Marketing Spark (The B2B SaaS Marketing Podcast)

Marketers will tell you the importance of really knowing their customers but how many marketers actually understand their customers inside out? Long-time marketer Mike Birt talks about the differnet approaches that marketers can take to gain customer insight. In this episode of Marketing Spark, we talk about the importance of rewarding and nurturing customers rather than simply focusing on customer acquisition. And Mike offers some suggestions on how to identify customer intentions and signals.

While marketers are obsessed with all things digital, direct mail marketing is alive and well. There's huge value in being able to target people by their physical addresses. As important, brands that leverage direct mail marketing are seeing impressive ROI. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Postie CEO Dave Fink talks about why direct mail is viable option for many brands and how it liberates marketers from dealing with tech giants like Facebook and Google. Dave also talk about his experiences as one of the first investors in Dollar Shave Club and what it was like to work with founder Michael Dubin.

Many companies develop great products. The problem is few people know about them. These companies struggle with a lack of money to do marketing. There's too much competition, or they're product-based. Andrew Grubb is experiencing this first-hand.  As the CEO of ThinkSound, which makes earphones and headphones, Andrew heads up a company that has loyal customers....but not enough of them. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Andrew talks about the challenges of attracting the spotlight and how Think Sounds plans to leverage community and influencers to drive sales.

Many B2B SaaS companies are started by engineers with no marketing expertise. They build the product but struggle to spread the word so people can discover and use it. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Verb Data's Dave Hurt talks about the steps he and his co-founder took to dip their toes in the marketing waters and some of the experiments they conducted along the way. It's great insight into how, in many respects, marketing involves taking a deep dive into what your customers want and how they articulate their needs.

In a fast-moving marketing landscape, it's a challenge to break through and attract the spotlight. Kacy Maxwell is taking a different and effective approach with a concept called sketchnotes that combines notetaking, doodling, and drawing. It's a user-friendly and quick way to communicate ideas at a time when multi-tasking people scan rather than read. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Kacy and I talked about: - Why he embraced sketchnotes - How B2B companies can embrace brand storytelling - The marketing outlook for 2022 - Gated content - His annual solitude trips.

Some companies aim to stand out from the crowd. They want to differentiate themselves from companies that walk, talk, and sound the same. Some companies want to go a step further. They want to compete in a new category. They embrace a concept called category design in which they define and lead a new market. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Josh Lowman offers insight into the definition of category design and how one of his clients embraced the concept.

xtensio is a classic story of how a service-based company turned a problem into a product. The company was working with startups and needed better ways to support buyer personas and other marketing activities It launched a few templates that resonated and then realized that there was more than enough demand to pivot the business. In this episode of Marketing Spark, xtensio CEO Alper Cakir talks about the journey and how it has leveraged content marketing to drive brand awareness and inbound traffic. It is interesting that xtensio doesn't have a marketing department. Instead, it relies on Cakir and in-house employees to create most of the content.

It's the wild west when it comes to building a personal brand.  There's no lack of advice, guidance, content, and coaches to establish a personal brand within a competitive landscape.  Michelle Griffin has some great insight into creating a strategic plan for personal branding. We talk about why personal branding is important for entrepreneurs and CEOs, and how to get started on platforms like LinkedIn.

Many B2B marketers are throttled by the need to generate MQLs. Their campaigns and activities are measured by how many email addresses are collected and fed to an army of business development and sales reps. Nelson Gilliat believes there's a better way. The "Buyer-centric revenue" model allows marketers to do good and creative marketing that drives brand awareness and generates customer interest in your products. At the same time, the buyer-centric revenue model eliminates a lot of the prospecting done by B2B SaaS companies. It's cold outreach and cold-calling that bother prospects rather than engage and educate. Nelson is the author of "Death of the SDR: Birth of Buyer Centric Revenue" 

Building a content marketing strategy is a lot like building a house, says Visme's Farzad Rashidi . You need a good foundation and infrastructure and a nice facade. You need to have a clear understanding of the best keywords that will attract readers to content and determine the most relevant channels to publish content. But creation should only account for 20% of your time. 80% should be devoted to promotion and distribution, as well as updating and refreshing existing content. That's the formula for content marketing success.