Episode #47: Building Your Owned Audience for B2B Marketing - Anthony Kennada
How audience marketing creates tomorrow's pipeline today
There’s a growing realization among B2B marketers that they can’t survive simply by targeting the companies in-market right now.
The mania for performance marketing in the 2010s pushed us as an industry towards easily measurable and scalable channels like Google Ads.
At the same time, “brand” initiatives were difficult to justify to your CFO, because they’re often invisible in touch-based attribution models and perceived as fluffy or even a waste of money.
But if you’ve run an adwords program, you’ve likely seen there are typically only a few keyword groups that indicate strong purchase intent (e.g., “best [your category] software”). Most likely, there will never be enough of these leads to satisfy your growth objectives. So what do you do?
According to Anthony Kennada—founding CMO of Gainsight and now founder and CEO of AudiencePlus—the answer is audience marketing.
As Anthony notes:
…prospects may not be empowered today with a budget to make purchasing decisions. [But] they're out there learning, seeking information, and looking for ways to get better….And so in many ways, I view this as a Renaissance and a pull back to like the original intention of, the marketing team, which is really meant to, build relationship for would be buyers. The net-net is, people aren't hitting their pipeline targets today, and so what you're effectively doing with audience marketing is you're building the pipeline for your pipeline…You're building the relationships so that when those folks are ready to buy, they're going to think of you first.
Anthony is a great marketer who has thought deeply about how brands should develop relationships with audiences for the long term. This wide-ranging conversation explores many facets of how to put this into practice.
Thanks to Our Sponsor
Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.
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About Today's Guest
Anthony Kennada is the co-founder and CEO of AudiencePlus—building software, content, and community to help every company become a media company.
Prior to founding AudiencePlus, he served as the CMO of companies like Hopin, Front, and Gainsight. At this last company, he and his team are credited with creating the Customer Success category.
Anthony is also the author of Category Creation: How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and Investors Will Love, which debuted as a number one new release on Amazon.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:43] - Evolving through growth stages at Gainsight
[06:40] - Category creation
[14:09] - Why should every company be a media company?
[24:31] - Metrics for audience marketing
[34:47] - Partnering with content creators
[40:25] - Edutainment
[44:29] - Golden Hour
Thanks to Our Sponsor
Big thanks goes out UserGems for sponsoring today’s episode.
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