In this episode Katy Howell, alongside Joel Harrison, Editor in Chief at B2B Marketing dissect the major trends shaping B2B marketing as we approach 2025. From the rise of ABM and influencer marketing to the strategic use of first-party data in a cookieless world. This discussion is essential for marketers aiming to pivot and thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Full Transcript

• Hello, we’re here. Honestly, technology, you got love it, aren’t you? Yeah, Streamyard bulked on us, and Joel and I have been here sweating and frantically trying to go, what’s gone wrong? You’re here, right? Apologies for the late start, if you’ve been patient enough to join us. Fabulous. Thank you. So, what are we going to talk about? Because we’re going to go back to the future, although I think it’s just the future of the future, what are our planning priorities for next year? So welcome. I’m Katy Howell, if you didn’t know that, and I’m here with Joel Harrison, who’s editor in chief and founder of B2B marketing and soon to be author of an upcoming book on B2B. Thanks for joining us, Joel. I’m sorry about the slightly stressful stuff.
• Oh, Katy, don’t worry. Uh, technology’s got amazing ability to let you down when you absolutely need it the most. Just literally about to go live when it when it went five minutes before, when talking for 10 minutes. I just thought, no, no, I’ll get them when they least expect it.
• Yeah, just ah, my heart rate is like through the roof right now, but anyway. Tell us a little bit, I can’t imagine there’s anybody on this that doesn’t know who you are, but just for the benefit who of those that may not – Joel, tell us a little bit about you.
• Well, thank you. I mean, I’d like to try and know as many B2B markets as I can, but you can’t know everybody. So, I’m founder, and I’m now called Editor-at-Large at B2B marketing, B2Bmarketing.net. With the guys who run the BB marketing awards, we run ignite, we run the ABM conference. We do loads and loads of stuff in the market. We used to be beating marketing magazine. Times have changed, and we now run a community called Propolis, which is the sense of our business. We set up 20 years ago, and we set up into a place where there wasn’t anything in B2B marketing. You know, if you’re around in the early noughties, if you picked up, it was everything was gone, dominated by the magazines. There were, like 14 marketing magazines you picked up Marketing and Marketing Week. You never seen that B2B. It was completely it was if it wasn’t there. And we now know it’s kind of at least half the global economy, if not more. It’s ridiculous. It shows how unobjective and biased those organisations were. So, we were auctioned into a market where there was nothing. And we’re lucky, in there some lovely people like you, Katy, who kind of coalesced this kind of market is kind of, we help catalyse this market coming up, developing around us, and now it’s really popular. People identify as B2B marketers. There’s loads of vendors and agencies in this space, and it’s a really rich, vibrant environment. But we like to say we’ve done our bit, you know, in helping spark something and then provide something to people to coalesce around. And I, you know, for 20 years, for me, you know, is my kind of life’s work. I’m so passionate about it. I love it, and I love watching it evolve, and watching it get better and more serious and more effective over the years.
• And you still are the center of quite a lot of B2B marketing, which is fantastic. And you say, I love how you talk about the passion, because I also think you have this very unique view of B2B because, in a way, everything sort of funnels through you, just what’s going on, what’s happening, all the interesting things. And that’s really why I got so excited about having you talk to us all, because I think next year is going to be quite pivotal. I think next year things are really changing in B2B and it I think that there’s a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of chaos in that opportunity. We’ve got inflation impacting budgets, we’ve got technology advancements, and, dare I say the word AI. We’ve got changes in strategy, and we’re trying as marketers to navigate this landscape and bring our leadership team with us. It’s kind of hard to see what you should what we should be doing. So, my first question before we get into the meat of planning and thinking about the future is something that will happen in the future, which is an upcoming book by you. And I wondered why, given all your experience, you were inspired to write a book about B2B and what, what you want to talk about. What was your inspiration?
• Well, I mean, Katy, I’m really lucky. Thank you for everything you said. It’s really, I mean, I’m really flattered by plaudits, right? And I’m just all, I’m trying to do my job to represent the industry. That’s, that’s, that’s really what I see my job being the honest broker. I mean, I’m really lucky in a position whereby, given that how our business has changed. You know, I’m not required for many years, I was like, I was Chief Product Officer, I was Chief Content Officer, I was Chief Customer Officer, I was Chief Events Officer, I was pulling all levers. It’s exhausting. I wasn’t really very good. It’s possible to do all those things well. But got a situation now, and B2B marketing, we have an excellent CEO, and Richard O’Connor, who is just doing phenomenal things to the company, and he’s given me space to step back. Dave Rowlands, he’s Head of content, who’s doing, who’s doing similarly well, Head of pride now, I should say so. He’s doing a great job. So I’ve got this opportunity to step back and be out in the market and I wanted to evolve from being someone who was kind of influential to being someone who had, who was like a thought leader, who had, because I’ve got a lot of opinions and knowledge, about a very broad breadth of things, but I haven’t got a great deal of depth anything. So, I thought, well, I really wanted to get really down into the depth of something. I’m also, you know, I’m a content person. I wanted, and I was fancy the intellectual exercise of writing a book, and I wanted to track where beating marking was changing. So, I’ve got this opportunity, and everything seemed to align. So, so it’s great. I said, I’m going to do it, and now I’ve got to get on with it. I was, I was very conscious saying giving myself a challenge to the market, I’ve got to crack on now.
• Oh, it’ll be. I can’t wait to be honest with you. We need it in B2B. We need pragmatism and insight from people like yourselves. So, I’m delighted, absolutely delighted. Um, so let’s get into the first meaty question. So, having witnessed many trends, you’ve seen them all come and go. Could you identify what consistently works in B2B marketing and what often fails?
• What consistently works? Well, I mean, looking at some data. I mean, from one thing I’ve been doing recently is extracting loads of data from our awards entries this year. And one thing that you can see that came across really strongly, that we’re really, I was very validating, was a balance of, there’s a lot of noise in the market about, you’ve got to invest all your money in brand, brands, where it’s at, everything’s in, everything’s on brand. It’s that’s not true, and we can see that from the data. It’s about a balance between brand, yes, and you have to express, understand your brand and communicate it well, but it’s about having a demand engine view of that. So, it’s this balance of all, but also the other layering that it’s having is understanding that people engage at different levels. So having that balance of marketing, stuff that seeks that plays to the longer term, the higher the bigger picture, but also plays to engaging people you know, and creating calls to action and helping them along that journey, and understanding the complexity of the decision-making unit, that’s important too. So, you can’t trade those things off. So that’s something to get that really, really annoys me and but I think it so that balance is really important. I think the other thing that, again, we can see in the data, I think that, and this is hard, and we’re talking about this beforehand, but I do think good creative does generally make an impact, right? Or great creative makes an impact. So, you’ve got to push yourself creatively, because I think there is so much me too content out there. One of the challenges inherent in that is, okay, how far can you go? How much, how far you got a license to do. There’s all kinds of stuff packed up in that. So, I think that having that balance, I’d say that the two things which are omnipresent is that that balance between brand and demand and trying to trying to push yourself as creative as much as you can. And I think the one person who exempt, who exemplifies that, for me, is Brian McCready, that, Oh sure, God, art of Brian voices. If I’m not feeling uncomfortable, I’m not doing my job properly, you know, I make the comparison between, he would love this, I know says before, it’s the David Bowie thing, right? It’s the, it’s the, you know, if I’m not, if I’m not changing, you know, I’ve got to, I’ve got to do, I’ve got to push the boundaries of whatever’s happening. I’ve got to not stand still. And I think that’s really, really vital. So those are the two things I’d say, yeah.
• Yeah. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, because I know we’re going to talk a little bit later, but to be creative to you need to know your audience and I have been both pleasantly surprised and also horrified at how little is known about the about buying behaviour in different sectors, varies per sector, but actually how little is known about the audience that we’re targeting, the customers. And right now, you know, I went to Andy Luanne’s B2B social day forum, I probably said that all back to front sorry. And it was really interesting, because the one thing that comes out of all the conversations, I had is that our buyers need to trust us, and that for me, next year has got to be a big part of this trust. So that’s definitely a point where I’ve got as a trend that’s been bubbling and bubbling and bubbling and bubbling, and I just think it’s going to go, it’s going to be center point next year.
• I think so too. Yeah, I really agree. Sorry, I can’t crush you.
• No, no – please do.
• I think there’s so much noise in the market that having a relationship with a with a brand, with a brand, understanding what they stand for is really important. I think that the trust is critical. And Katy, what you didn’t, you teed me up to talk about the topic of my book, and I didn’t take the opportunity. So, my topic is going to be on thought leadership. And the reason I’m doing that is there you go, so, you circle back on it is that is exactly that point about trust. It’s about and I think some great research by Man Bites dog recently, there’s loads of great stuff on broader ship out there, but that one of the things they were saying is that, you know, business executives really value information from trusted providers. You know, it’s a mutually reinforcing thing in this world where they had disintermediation, where there aren’t so many trusted in doing, of thought sources. There’s all this noise, all this social noise everywhere, and some of it of dubious, you know, origin and actually grounding to have when you have a relation with a brand that you really trust, that you, that you understand what they stand for – that’s really powerful and not and I don’t think it’s a choice not to do proper thought leadership these days. That’s why I’m writing about thought leadership.
• Oh, and as you know, with me, a very hot topic indeed. Let’s just, let’s just back up a little bit.
• Sorry.
• I’m just, I’m just going to look at stats, a Gartner report showing that 82% of global B2B marketing marketing-decision makers are really quite bullish about the increased investment they’re going to get. So, 35% of B2B marketing folk think that they’re expecting a budget increase of 5% next year? Is that? Is that a good thing, or is it just going to get sucked up with inflation? And what should, what should marketeers prioritise?
• Well, I think budgets come and go, don’t they. I kind of think, and, you know, small increases, yeah, makes me different, but it’s, I feel it’s always a perennial battle. I don’t think much has changed. We’re always trying to look for efficiencies. We always look how we can do be better, be more effective, you know. And you know, AI is very much in that conversation right now. But I think, I think we’re also looking at how we can have most impact for our budget, whatever that might be. And that means probably moving away from those kinds of random acts of marketing, which is all too easy to get sucked into, and doing things that we are perhaps politically required to do within the organisation, which we know probably aren’t going to have much impact or are apropos to the bigger picture. So, I think that’s really where the kind of the progress we need to make. So yeah, great if we get some small budget increases. But I don’t I think that there’s a longer-term transition that we need to make. And in Propolis, which is our B2B marketing community, we’ve got a big message around being a commercial marketer and what that actually looks like. We’ve got a great diagram about all the skills that you need to be truly commercial. And an aspect of that is something that’s been bubbling under and I was so delighted the great work the people in populist did Shane Redding and Scott McKee, Scott stock up particularly, did some excellent work on this, and really formed this about how you it’s not just about how you communicate with the board. It is about that, but it’s about having the nuances of all aspects of what you do to be commercial, to better drive that thing that forward, and then understand how marketing engages with it, and not get stuck in the marketing silo to see the bigger, bigger picture. So, I think, I think that’s, I think, yes, I’m really optimistic about the future. There are huge opportunities for marketers. I think B2B marketing is just, it goes from strength to strength. I’m just constantly impressed by it. But at the same time, a small increase in your budget isn’t probably going to make that much difference. It’s about learning how to align better with the business and use your existing resources better.
• Yes, and I think with so much going on, we got into, I don’t know if you agree with me, but I felt we got into a habit after COVID where we all rolled our sleeves up and kind of got into the detail of not standing back. And I’ve been ranting for the last couple of weeks now about planning and how important planning is and having some focus. Because not only is it great for you and your team to know where you’re heading, but for me, one of the bigger challenges is now letting your leadership team know that’s where you’re going and stop derailing us with your random ideas. Love leadership teams. Okay, so please do ask questions, guys who are watching live, what I will endeavour to answer as many as we can. But before we do, I’m going to just most of this conversation is just about B2B marketing, except for this one, because I have, I have to ask about social media, because it seems to me, lots of B2B marketeers have put social media top of their list of tactics for next year, which is, you know, you’d think would be great news. Is it good news, or is it a total nightmare? Does it indicate a move towards relationship building or more crap content? Sorry, I can’t think of another way of putting it, but you know what I mean, too much noise.
• Unoptimised content perhaps we could say rather than crap, but I agree as well. I mean. I mean, sometimes I guess it can be, yeah, it can be great and it can be awful, because it’s a spectrum, like everything else. It’s one way of being very tangibly visible and that is, again, good and bad. I think that social media used well is incredibly powerful, and I think we’re beginning to understand much better about how to do that. I think if you’ve got to give credit to LinkedIn and then how they’re evolving their platform and some of the things they’re able. They talked a lot about influencer marketing, which I think we might talk about that later on. But stuff like that is really good, but, but if you can do social media, well, if you can do it in a considered way, you can build it as part of a considered, coherent process, if you can align it with thought leadership, if you can add it with influencer marketing, if you can you can use the advertising opportunities around it, great, but just more noise for his own sake. No one will thank you for that. You’ll get drowned out. I think, I really think that to your point, trust is going to rise to the top next year. You know, quality is going to rise to the top as well. It’s just not about saying, just pumping up more and more stuff. It’s about doing, having, having messages that are coherent and consistent and engageable, alignable with. So, yeah, do it, but do it well.
• Yeah, and I totally agree. Trust quality. But there’s one other bit, which is that social is a kind of all the funnel. If you start to think of it as all the funnel, you can actually work it better, which is you want to look at some of your content being trigger content, content will get attention the typical adverts. You know, look at this. This, that blah, blah, blah, shock, horror. Let’s look at this. And also, what’s called pre-influence, which I’ll talk about another day, because it’s a great, long subject. And then what you should be doing is looking to nudge nurture. And as LinkedIn says, you know, it’s five to nine touch points to an action, but it’s actually more like 30 touch points to, you know, to get a proper lead in through the door. So the reality is, you want to be nudge nurturing and then having a value exchange. We all know about the gated content and its poor performance over the last 18 months, is your content has to be damn good. So, all of that requires intense thinking again. Now’s the time to think about it. Think across the year ahead, line it up to the pain points, all that sort of good stuff that we’re used to doing. I just feel like this is the time to kind of get ahead of yourself. But social is not the only tactic, and last week, I think it was you, you were at the ABM conference, and I wanted to talk about ABM, because it feels like, I think the first event I ever went to of yours, which must have been about 10, for even 15 years ago, a B2B marketing event,  you talked about ABM, really new, but, yeah, still talking about ABM. Is it a good thing?
• Yeah, definitely it’s a good thing. I mean, I mean, I thought, don’t get I was one of the people, so we worked out we did our first ABM conference nine years ago. So it was nine years that we must come to that.
• Okay.
• But it, you know, I thought this is going to be a couple of years that we got to be something else, but it keeps going. And this year we had our biggest ever ABM event. We had 600 people there, which is just phenomenal. And some of this data we pulled out from the awards, ABM is actually twice as effective as non-ABM marketing. And that given we’re an environment, actually, where things are slowing down. ABM is not a quick win. ABM takes time to deliver. That’s phenomenal statistic. That’s amazing. That really boggled my mind when I saw that. So, yeah, it’s really powerful. Um, you know, LinkedIn Institute tried to call it something else now, like, it’s like they’re just, they’re trying to reinvent the wheel for this for its own sake, which is just bonkers. ABM, all the different flavours of it. Having that depth of, as you said at the beginning, there that depth of understanding, really understanding who your customers are, what it is they want, all the different personas, that’s only, only adds to your effectiveness as a marketer. Aligning with sales, really having that proper, cohesive dialog and shared engagement is critical. So, for all of those reasons, it’s really vital. Of course, it’s not relevant for everybody, because there are, you know, there are mass market activities where you’re talking to sole traders, very small businesses where it’s not really relevant to ABM, you know, and there’s that blurring of boundaries in programmatic, what’s programmatic, ABM, and what’s demand gen I turn up to get involved in that conversation, but I think what you’re doing complex products, and see complex products and services with very high ticket values and multiple decision makers, ABM, is just a logical choice because it is difficult to do it, and you’re not going to, and all those reasons you mentioned earlier on. You know leads as I think someone at Trend Dreamer, whose name escapes me, was saying leads are no longer the leading indicator. By the time you identified somebody, they are probably a long way, if not pretty much, already made the decision. So, I completely buy into that one. So, ABM allows you to do that because you are identifying people and focusing your again, as you said, limited marketing budget around those things.
• Did you see anything that stood out for you at the event that you thought, gosh, you know, because, because there’s all sorts of different flavours of ABM, people do different versions. Is there any kind of thing that you thought, oh, that’s different?
• Well, I wrote a blog about after my thing, the thing that came out to me most of all was about, often people talk about ABM. This is a tactic. And this is, you know, it’s an alternative demand generation. Actually, it’s not. It really ABM is about transformation. It’s about marketing transferring market. It’s revenue transformation. Because it works across the piece. It gives you the license, the need and the opportunity to re-engineer or reimagine your whole revenue journey. And that was confirmed time and time again. By the speakers, we had some phenomenal speakers there. Ryan Almond from Henkel, Oli Hamas Howell from EY and James Hastandard from HP, stand out, particularly for me, in those in that conversation talking about that transformation they’ve made that moving towards ABM has allowed them to do and how that changed their nature, that conversation that they had the rest of the business, and empowered marketing, and that’s great.
• Yeah, yeah, oh, it sounds fantastic. And I think it is going to be one of the elements you can use as a game changer for next year. You know, if you’re not doing it, or if you are doing it. Do it better.
• Yeah, and, but don’t just, don’t, but just, sorry, Katy, don’t just embark on that journey like: Oh, it’ll be great. You know, we’ll just, well, we’ll do ABM in six month’s time, we’ll be learning it’s more complex than that. Talk to Robert Nora, who’s our ABM trainer. He’ll tell you, he’ll give you our ABM course, about starting up is a great way to understand what’s required, because it’s not easy, right? Nothing’s ever easy is ever worth doing.
• No, and a lot of B2B marketing isn’t easy, but it’s very satisfying when you get it right, absolutely. So, we’ve touched a little bit on content here and there throughout this chat, um, and there’s a really interesting piece of work by Peter Field that says dull doesn’t sell and it’s all about it should all be about pushing emotional and fame based ads to the forefront. But, you know, B2B marketeers can they really pull off that kind of consumer stunts? Can they do this? I’m being controversial because I have views as you know. But are they compromising on professional decorum?
• Well, look, I get a bit annoyed that Peter Field gets credit for this because it’s been this conversation has been going on for a lot longer than Peter Field briefly greatest of his presence in B2B, and then disappeared again. You know people I go, I defer to people like Paul Cash. You know, who wrote book on Humanising B2B. That’s the trend, right? That’s what we’re talking about. Emotions been, you know, and LinkedIn Institute, I talked about this recently. It’s been around. I there was a stat, I was presentation I saw in the US in about 2006 years and seven which showed had a great chart where it showed the level of emotional engagement with B2B round, but the B2C brands, and it showed that the B2B rounds were far more engaged emotionally. Your connectivity with those brands was vastly different. And the time it blew my mind. But then you think about it now, it’s like, well, you know, if you don’t, they listen to these brands. If you go to CVS pharmacy, I don’t have your brand of shower gel, that’s annoying. But if Deloitte mess up your audit, you might go to prison, right? So, you know, this is like, incomparable.
• Yeah.
• Of course you need to be emotional. I think B2B markets are getting it. It’s hard. It’s and you’re always and you get lots of pushback from the organisation. People expect it to be logical. They expect to be featured, to be to be features lead, but, but I think that the general trend is getting in that direction. Can we ever be exactly like consumer brands? No, we can’t, because it’s different. Can we adopt a more consumer way of talking about things? Yeah, inherently, we’re doing that a long period of time, and it’s partly just because of the generational shift that’s going on, you know, like Katy, you and I remember a time when it was all about how many widgets has my server got in the advertising and trade press, you know, and that’s, thank god that’s gone, but, and we’re moving to this world, but we’re still at the still a long way to go. And actually, it is a moving target as well, because, because cultural change is ongoing and buyers are shifting all the time.
• I thought at your B2B Ignite event, Dentsu B2B did, shared some survey data that they’d done in the industry. And there was one point which kind of left me slightly open mouthed, and that was that the drivers to purchase in B2B were had shifted so much from being the professional drivers to the personal drivers that now personal drivers outweighed professional drivers for the first time ever. So, in other words, we’re worried about our jobs. Buyers are worried about their jobs. They’re worried about just fascinated by this.
• I think. And that’s great report by those superpowers. Report is excellent. Don’t if you haven’t seen really, go download it, because it’s really, really good. They cover a load of ground. They’ve really invested. That’s a great example of authorship, right from Dentsu, so, well done. But that this, again, there’s nothing new in that, right? And I align that again, this stuff in the stuff from 2006 was all about that, that level of emotion involved in that, and I and there was, and I think it’s the behavioural science stuff, right, that that’s where that clicked for me. And that came in, you know, people like Roy Sutton’s obviously the champion of it. But, Ernest, Chris Wilson, did a great job talking about that as well. And it’s as much the people will they will make a decision based on a set of emotional criteria and then post rationalise that around a set of rational criteria and say that’s why they made the decision. They didn’t make a decision because, because you were because that was the best solution for them. They made this decision because it was had most was most functionally, which they made it because that was the one that was the one that was least likely to get them sacked, or maybe like an idiot in front of their colleagues, right? So it’s all about emotion. It always has been, and I have to rein myself in to remember that some people haven’t been there for 20 years, and we enjoy these conferences that I have, but it’s always been there. There’s nothing new in this. We’ve all got to learn this is true. It’s fundamentally true.
• Yeah. And we need to be able to persuade the wider organisations we work within to accept that, because they are not at the front. Yes. I mean, we keep coming back to this, but that would be, you know, we need to not allow, you know, creative by committee, which ends up being so washed and rinse that what comes out the other end is bland and pointless, so it and I think there, therein lies some of the challenges that our CMOs face in the current climate. So yeah, risk aversion, interesting amongst buyers, definitely. And I’m with you, it’s been this is not a new thing. And yes, Peter Field has jumped on the bandwagon for a bit and gone away again. By the way, another person you mentioned Rory, and I was going to say there’s another book that is absolutely worth reading, and that is by Richard Shotman – it’s the Choice factory. It’s honestly, it’s just such a joy to read, but it’s why we make decisions, and it really applies in B2B. So definitely worth, worth a read, if you fancy that, right? We have to talk about AI. I feel that that’s we ever do these days. But anyway, so we’ve got AI and machine learning, and it feels like B2B market is apparently 87% of marketers service survey said they’re testing AI, so that’s pretty good. It means that that it’s not being ignored. But is it really going to help? What are your thoughts?
• Well, yeah, it’s really interesting. Actually, the ABM conference, we could really see this coming alive. You this coming alive. You, like you had a year ago. You had people going, oh, there’s this thing and there, there’s a little kind of random act of testing. Now, most presentations could actively say how they they’ve used it in their marketing, which is great, but I think, I mean, when you, you said this question of answer, I was thinking about, you had Tom Head on your LinkedIn live recently, didn’t you one? And Tom, Tom’s great. And Tom did a session for us a couple of years back about web3, actually, when, and that shows how, how fashion orientated marketing can be. And Tom’s point, which was absolutely brilliant at the time, was like talking about web3, was saying that in web three terms, 2020 23 or 22 whenever it was. It’s a bit like what 1995 was for the Internet, right? We don’t, we can’t really conceive as humans about what that transformation looks like. We’re just starting to deploy it meaningfully. But we’re at the, we’re at the very, very early foothills of that transformation. And I, I see it as it’s a bit like, you know, the different tiers. And there’s not only two the ones obvious to me, having turned on a couple round tables on this. The first one is the individual experimentation, right, improving my processes. The second then is, is structural reorganisation. So actually, somebody running the marketing team is going: Okay, we then need to redeploy our resources in a different way. And it’s not about saving costs. It’s about getting more out of what existing resources and skill sets, or that might require re skilling a little bit. And then the level above that, there’s a product level engagement with AI, you know, and we’re starting to do that as an organisation ourselves, in a way, then it’s kind of crept up serendipity, unless you’re experimenting with that, you can’t understand the opportunities.
• And one other part is number crunching, so where data is really important, that the speed at which AI can help you, depending on which type of AI you’re using, but in terms of looking at where there are changes to intent, data, purchase data, what the journey is starting to look like. All of these things are really fascinating. How we’ll plug them into the everyday is evolving. But I think you can see the opportunity, as you rightly say, a little bit. And I love the analogy that it’s like nine early 90s, because I remember when I when we were still on dial up and trying to fathom how to use flash based websites that would do all these wizzy things that we loved that we never see anymore. So, what was at the beginning is no longer at.
• Tom had this amazing bit of video, and sorry, it was at the conference. It was, um, it was Bill Gates on Letterman. Bill Gates looking about five years old, talking about the internet and trying to explain to Letterman what the internet was in 1995 and it’s hilarious. You know, it was quite funny at the time. Was hilarious in hindsight, because Bill because Bill Gates going well, you can watch a baseball game and persons like, you can watch that on TV. And he said, Yeah, but you can record and watch it later. So, have you heard of a video recorder? And that was, that was the best he could do to explain the internet. That’s where, like, in 19, that’s where we are right now.
• Yeah, yeah. Love that. Love that. And it also makes us all feel like, you know what we’ll all get there is that we didn’t the internet. So, right. So, we’ve covered, ah, there’s one element we need to go. I’ve kind of touched on it with when I talked about AI and data, and that is the story about the fact that we are losing cookies, whether we like it or not, on whether Google does it or not. The point is that the cookie-less future is here, and for a number of us, including those involved in programmatic but also how we collate data and what we do with it is, is throwing things in the air. Because when we focus on demand gen and lead gen, from my perspective, the biggest challenge that is out there for marketeers is quality data. So how do you think B2B marketeers should adjust their strategies?
• Well, yeah, it’s a really tough one, because I think we all agree that you want to have information about your prospects and customers, but I think I refer to the earlier point about leads not being leading indicators anymore. They probably already got on that journey. So, I think that I don’t think you should necessarily stop doing I think we have to accept that this ship has sailed to a certain extent, and it’s about that they recognising that buyers will do most of their research offline and or at least incognito or invisible mode, and they’ll raise their hand when they’re good and ready. So, you know, and I think that you know, what you want to do is to speed their access to content as fast as possible. So, putting Gates had to be used under extreme caution, as you indicated earlier on. So, so yeah, and I think this is, this is where things, again, all comes back to thought leadership. You want to have a dialog and have respect and have people following your organization. They can do that incognito. You want to be able to use thought leadership to challenge people’s expectations and understanding and present problems where they perhaps didn’t realize they were problems, and put your brand in their mind, and then when they understand those things, when they are ready to buy, they will come to you.
• Yeah and I think if you are going to use sort of advertising and programmatic, which, of course, it is really start to look at the efficiency of the data that you’re collecting and how you’re moving it from that third party to first party, you know, to how are you collecting your own data? How are you beginning to understand your audiences better? It’s less of a challenge in social where we have walled gardens, but outside of that sphere, it, it is a little bit wild west still, and I think there’s little bit straightening out that’s going to happen.
• I think little bit is an understatement. I think that we can do some lead gen work, and lead generation work, because it’s something I’ve really ignored. It just amazes me that there’s still this huge amount of money being spent on lead generation and is and again, it goes back to the thing you said, the beginning, about how, one of the things the beginning, about how, you know, the commercial team, well, sorry, the CFO and the CEO want results now. They want results tomorrow. And they think that, well, why didn’t you go and do the thing that’s going to invest some money in something which is going to you think is going to drive a result, but investing money in cold data is unlikely to do that. So there’s a lot of misconceptions going on there.
• Yes, yeah. I read something the other day that nobody is asking about the quality leads. They just want the volume, so it’s just the number, which sort of is just, you know, mother or all, as they say, Oh, wait, what? Don’t get me on this. I want to go back to something you said the beginning, about thought leadership and influencing, and talk about influencer marketing in B2 B. Because is it effective? Does it bring the authentic? Is it the same as you know, somebody who you know on my Tiktok is selling me more makeup, or lipstick that will make my lips really big, or, you know, or is it just another buzzword in B2 B? Is it the same? What’s your experience of influencer marketing?
• Well, so my experience of it, I think it is something that is a really now trend. It’s something which is, I have lost count the number of times over the last 15 years, people have said influencer marketing a breakthrough and B to B, and it never has. But there seems to be a critical weight, critical mass of people talking about it to make it successful. And the technologies evolved to a point where it’s possible as well. Now you have things like. Think the LinkedIn platforms evolved in us in a very positive way. So does it? Does it work? It certainly can work, but I don’t think anyone can claim to have completely nailed it yet. I mean, but it is about trust. As you said, it’s all about trust. You know, you’re looking to work with people who have trust or and or reach that your brand might not have and can bring different perspectives through objectivity. And I think I feel a bit like as a recovering print journalist, you know, I feel like influencers can bring that objectivity into, back into the market in a way that, in a way that perhaps has been lacking through the kind of change in the media landscape. So, I’m quite positive about it. I think the ogre we did a piece last summer, I think where they were kind of saying they kind of describe the influencer world, and it kind of describes the kind of media PR world really largely to me, you know. they’re basically taking it was new light through our windows to a certain extent, but then the windows have changed. So I don’t think that’s necessarily terrible. So, yeah, I’m quite positive. I’m quite excited about it. I think there’s, we’re going to see more of it. We just got to and I mean, that’s why I’m positioning myself in that space, because I’ve, I already kind of do some of that stuff already. I just haven’t actively called myself that until about six weeks ago.
• I think, Oh, yeah. And I think you’re spot on. I also think that marketeers need to be aware that I think, Oh, yeah. And I think you’re spot on. I also think that marketeers need to be aware that in B2B, they need long term relationships with those influencers. We’re always saying in consumer but it’s the same in B2B, and making sure you’re lined up with your influencers so that you can have that long term relationship, and then I think it works brilliantly. Exactly as you said, you’ve got a third party speaking positively, hopefully about you, but also adding the value of that thought leadership that you talked about, which is which you can bring together. And on that, on that note of thought leadership. Because I know we’re I know we started late, but I have we are running a little out of time, so I just wanted to skip I was going to talk about video, but let’s just go on to thought leadership, because particularly if your book is going to take a little focus on this. I think I’d love some ideas and tips, or anything that you thought interesting, even if it isn’t directly out of what the book will be, but things that you think this is what made me focus on thought leadership.
• Well, I think the reason I want to focus on it is because a few things, one is that, as I’ve mentioned right at the top, there’s a kind of, there’s been this tussle for a long time between brand and demand or, really, it’s been people who sell brand and advertising guilting everybody else that they’re doing demand generation. That’s it’s been like, it’s been like, brand shaming, essentially, which drives me up the wall. Because, as I said before, actually what we can prove is that it works if you do them both together. It works better if you’re both together. So, so there’s part of that. And the thing about thought leadership is actually sits, it’s got the ability to sit in between brand and demand, and do both, and then actually also, then play a role through the full funnel, all the way through to sales enablement. And there’s not many things out there you can do that. It’s the archetypal big, long idea. You have to invest in it and properly and consider it. It has to be robust and thought through. It’s more than just creative platitudes. Has to be really, really in depth and well-argued and well considered. So it has all kinds of implications across all kind of areas. And I think that’s great. It’s also content, which, given I’m a journalist, you know, it’s my happy place, so that so, so that’s good. And the problem with one of the just back to the other point about brand. Well, the problem with people saying, well, you’ve got to invest your money in brand. That’s very loaded, right? A, evidence suggests it’s not going to be successful and B, doing brand based campaigns. Only brand based campaigns gets you into trouble, gets you into conflict with the CEO, because who owns the brand, right? So you’ve got, so you’ve got that kind of, What should it look like? Who should express it, all those challenges around associated with that. And also, marketers, as we know, have to demonstrate effectiveness, otherwise they’re going to be out of a job. So if you’re going to do something, you’re going to spend lots of money on something which isn’t going to prove effectiveness for an indeterminate period of time. How long is the B2B buying cycle? Then you’re undermining your own career. So therefore, I mean, my kind of suggestion with this is that the thought leadership is something which can sit in that chasm, can play to both brand and demand and all the way through the funnel, and means you don’t have to mess with that big problem, which is brand. You can do something. But the thing is, it’s complicated. It’s not easy to do. And I like complicated things because I’m a geek.
• Yes, yes. And it requires people to change practice, because you’re inevitably as a marketeer who might be leading a thought leadership program, having to work with people who maybe are not marketeers, but subject matter experts. And that is in itself quite an interesting change for marketeers who have been quite used to sitting behind computer. And bashing away at the tasks in front of them. This is, this is a slightly different, almost veering into coaching as well as marketing. So it’s a new space.
• It is new space. There’s all kinds of implications around it, and it’s fascinating. I think there’s so many opportunities from it. So, yeah, I’m excited to get stuck in.
• Me too. Listen. Thank you so much. Joel, that has that is fascinating. I feel like we’ve covered loads which is sort of everything for more budget. If you got, if you’re lucky enough to get more budget, it doesn’t mean things are going to be rapidly better. You still need to look for efficiency. So, start to look at your planning in a more pragmatic way. We’ve talked about ABM, which is definitely something you need to look at in terms of doing seriously, sort of social and content about. You know, I’m halfway through writing a post about how you need to go slow on social, because I feel like we need to slow down before we go out there. And then, you know, on to thought leadership. There’s lots for us to start to think about how that mix will, you know, fill the spectrum between a little brand and demand gen and all the bits that fit in between. If anybody gets it right, share it with us, because it’s still feels very complex, but that’s been fantastic. Thank you very much. Thank you to our audience. We are likely to have one more live before the end of the year. I haven’t fixed a date yet. I’m so sorry, but I will come out and pest you all. And if anybody has any questions afterwards, please just ping them. I will share them with Joel, and we can always come back on the comment section. So please do. Thank you very much.
• And yeah, thanks for inviting me.
• It’s great. Thanks, Joel.
• Cheers. You.