B2B Content Show: A Podcast About the How, What, and Why of B2B Content Marketing

One of the biggest sources of tension between marketing and sales is the quality of leads. From the point of view of sales, marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are notoriously iffy, derived from people downloading gated content and signing up for newsletters and so on. Marketing hands these leads over to sales, thinking, we've done our part! But sales turns around and says, these leads are garbage! People who download an ebook or whatever are not necessarily in the market. We need leads that are actually ready to buy!It stands to reason that marketers could do with a better way of sourcing and evaluating leads before handing them to sales. What could that look like? My guest today is here to paint us a picture. Quincy Johnson is a senior consultant at Compound Growth Marketing, a demand generation consultancy.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In some very basic way. the purpose of marketing is to support sales. And so it stands to reason that the more marketers know about how sales actually works, the better. But marketers often have only a hazy understanding of what motivates salespeople and HOW they sell. I know that was my experience when I worked as a copywriter in the medical device industry. I actually went through sales training and did ride alongs with reps. But still, in my day to day work I wasn't really seeing things from a sales perspective. To help us better understand what marketers ought to know about how sales works, my guests today are Joel Barker and Karl Steiner. Joel is creative director and principal at Lion's Way Content, and Karl is lead writer and principle Lion's Way.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's nothing more frustrating for marketers than pouring your heart and soul into a piece of content, only to have sales reps ignore it or use it the wrong way.  My guest on this episode has lots of experience dealing with this issue. He is Nick Loise, founder of Sales Performance Team, a leading fractional sales leadership and new business development firm. We talk about what causes marketers to produce content that sales people don't value or understand and what marketers can do to create content that salespeople DO value.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever thought about getting into speaking?If so, then this episode is for you. Juli Lassow, an entrepreneur, founder of JHL Solutions, and a frequent speaker. We talk about how to get started with speaking, how to overcome the fear of public speaking (right up there with death as many people's #1 fear!), how to use speaking opportunities to market yourself and your business, and much more!The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Buyer personas are a staple of any b2b marketing playbook, for obvious reasons. They give marketers a target to aim at and provide insight and guidelines for how to engage prospects and convert them into customers. The problem, though, is that buyer personas are based on information about, well, buyers, which at any given time comprise only around 5% of your total market. What buyer personas typically DON'T take into account are the whopping 95% of your market that's not in buying mode. Would it not make sense to ALSO create personas for that large segment of your market that isn't ready to buy?This insight led today's guest, Matthew Lewsadder, to write and publish a book on the topic: Buystander Personas: How to gain breakthrough insights into out of market b2b audiences, create massive demand for your brand, and win where others aren't competing.Matthew is also founder and CEO of Brighttail, a B2B demand marketing agency.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It stands to reason that the most effective content is content that's informed by data. Specifically, data about what customers value about a company's products and services. The better you design a piece of content to speak to the specific needs, desired outcomes, and preferences of the people you're trying to sell it to, based on what you learn from your current customers, the better that content is likely to perform. Actually doing this, though, is easier said than done. My guest today is here to share her process for infusing content with valuable product user and product lifecycle data. Ashley Litzenberger is a product and solution marketing expert and founder of Ashley Litzenberger Consulting,Link 1 linkedin.com/in/alitzenbergerhigheredThe B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Podcasting can be a great way to reach and engage an audience, create and repurpose a lot of content, and have meaningful conversations with people you want to get to know.But starting a podcast can ALSO be a powerful driver for personal growth.In this episode, Bryan Huhn, a financial advisor and host of the Affordable Freedom podcast, talks about how podcasting has helped him become more confident in meeting and having conversations with new people, becoming a better listener, and much more! The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Interviewing is easy, right? You just ask a bunch of questions, record the answers, and that's it. Of course, if you're a regular listener or if you know me at all, you know that's not true. Interviewing at a high level is an art & a science, involving complexities that are hard to appreciate until you encounter them. For example, people in positions of power, such as a CEO, are often very careful during interviews to not say the wrong thing. And so they lapse into corporate jargon and blandly recite the company's purpose and mission statement. As the interviewer, though, that's not what you came for. You want the real thing. But how do you get beyond the corporate facade and get the interviewee to open up?To help us unravel this puzzle, my guest is Dean Nelson, founder and director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, founder and host of The Writers Symposium by the Sea, and author the book Talk to Me: How to ask better questions, get better answers, and interview anyone like a pro.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

4 years ago, when I started Connversa, I built a website using Wix, the drag and drop DIY website platform. But I felt a little weird about it, because I had it in my head that REAL websites are built on Wordpress ... AND that a website I built myself just wasn't good enough. And so, after a few years, I hired a company to build me a real, professional Wordpress site. But did I HAVE to do that? Maybe, instead of paying a lot of money to get a brand new website, you can opt for hiring someone to improve your current site.To help us work through this, my guest today is Niki Clark, founder and CEO of Niki Clark Marketing.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all know that case studies are among the most useful kind of content any B2B company can have. According to the 2023 SaaS Marketing Case Studies report, from Uplift Content, SaaS marketers ranked case studies as the most valuable type of content to increase sales. Other reports have found similar results in other industries. But the Uplift report also found that only 12% of SaaS marketers are very satisfied with their case studies. So, there's apparently lots of room for improvement. To help us understand how companies can produce better case studies, my guest is Emily Amos, founder and CEO of Uplift Content.The B2B Content Show is brought to you by Connversa, helping busy CEOs and business owners create a month’s worth of difference-making video content in 60 minutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.