The Friday Concentrate #30: Shut up and Listen

Is it a bit aggressive? Maybe.

Is it true? Absolutely.

Throughout this week, I had several reminders to sit back, be quiet, and listen. It's amazing what you'll learn. Here's a bit about each experience...

1?? Data-Driven Content: From Engagement to Sales Intelligence

On Tuesday, The Juice had the privilege of having Theresa Anderson host a conversation with Ariana Shannon and Jake Reni .

With Theresa hosting the conversation, I played the role of behind-the-scenes producer. This was a great forcing function to sit quietly and ... listen. It's amazing what I learned.

How to turn content into engagement and engagement into sales.

The compromise between marketing-driven strategy and sales-driven strategy when it comes to what to create. What marketing wants vs. what sales needs.

Even better, the best conversations happened backstage as we discussed the rise of "intent data." We talked about the difference between intent data, buyer signals, and everything else everyone is calling it. Has it become white noise? Or can it still be helpful? What's the difference between how marketing can use the data and sales?

It was a fascinating conversation which leads me to my next lesson...

2?? Listen to your customers over-and-over again

This has been the biggest thing I've learned in the founder and entrepreneur journey. As a marketer, I had spent most of my career obsessing over new business and pipeline generation. I have learned that I was wildly underserving our customers and our own custome success team.

So while it's cliché advice to listen to your customers, I think it's still too often viewed as a box-checking activity.

"I'll join onboarding calls" or "I'll join for the renewal conversation" and we check the box, pat ourselves on the back and go on to other priorities.

However, I've learned you have to keep going back to the same customers over-and-over again. The market is ever evolving which means your customers priorities, goals, budgets, challenges and pain points are ever-evolving. If you're not ever-listening (yes, I just made this up), you're going to underserve them.

Its through this repetitive listening that The Juice has decided to lean into the demand generation use case. With a tight tech market, marketers are feeling the pressure to generate leads—so, that's what we're doing. And we're launching beta with 10 customers. If you're interested, we'd love to chat.

Speaking of chatting, that brings me to the last lesson in listening...

3?? Deep Conversations on The Content Cocktail Hour

Yes, you literally have to listen to the podcasts but that's not the lesson here.

Both of this week's conversations involved listening.

In the first episode, Elizabeth Irvine shared how she has learned to listen as her role has expanded from marketing to marketing and customer success. She shares the value of listening to their language and few steps marketers can take to better listen to their customers and infuse that into their marketing efforts.

In the second episode, I had the joy of listening to one of my favorite B2B Content creators— Ryan Law , Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs .

We discussed listening to ... data. I have always admired and drawn inspiration from how Ryan and his team use data in their content. It was a fascinating listen as he explained that they don't use data to prove outcomes. Instead, they use data to learn and then understand the outcome. Too often, we use (manipulate?) data to prove a point we already know.

His team uses data to learn. From those learnings, they create incredible content.

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It was a fascinating week of listening and learning. I look forward to more listening and more lessons in my future.

Until Next Time,

Jonathan

A Dash of Data:

Speaking of podcasts, in our "State of the B2B Podcast Listener" report we found that...

33% of the top 100 podcast episodes on our platform mention a job function explicitly in the title.

The takeaway: know exactly who you are creating content for and tell them in the title.

Fresh Content From The Week:

?? Optimizing your marketing mix with Rand Fishkin (SparkToro)

By: Paramark.com , Rand Fishkin , Pranav Piyush

Pranav is joined by Rand Fishkin. Rand is the co-founder of SparkToro. They discuss: the ways marketing attribution is broken, how SparkToro is bringing a new level of audience research to marketers everywhere, and how best to optimize your marketing mix.

?? The Squishiness of Content to Pipeline Reporting | Part 1: The ROI of Story

From: Content Workshop ?? , David J Ebner ?? , JB Clark , and Jonathan Gandolf

We are at a strange crossroads in the world of content marketing and SEO. Google is changing in ways that will undoubtedly have repercussions for anyone in publishing (and really anyone who does business online). At the same time, AI is making it easier to create content, which, good or lazy, is flooding the internet.