Swipe Files - 📂 How to leverage B2B creators

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Today's newsletter is proudly supported by The Juice 🙌

You're gonna love this... The Juice is essentially Spotify for marketing & sales content. If you're anything like me and you can't get enough blog posts, podcasts, case studies, videos, and ebooks on marketing, look no further.

I'm partnering with them to aggregate all Swipe Files content to concurrently live on The Juice platform, and if you're creating content for your company, you should too. I have three(ish) words for you: built-in distribution.

And if you're a marketing nerd like me, go create a free account and start exploring their already massive library to take your marketing game to the next level.

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Today's newsletter is by my friend and SaaS marketer Brett McGrath.

Brett heads up marketing at The Juice and has been in the game for a long time.

And for the Swipe Files audience only, he's sharing some raws thoughts on what they're working on right now.

I’m Brett.

I’m a first time Dad to a 5 month old baby girl. I just celebrated my 8 year anniversary of marriage with my high school sweetheart. I wake up most mornings at 5am to get a run in because I know it’s good for my physical and mental health. I’ve got a vinyl collection. I have a sports cards collection. I started a podcast during the pandemic about sports cards and now it’s one of the most downloaded podcasts in the category every week. Professional wrestling is my guilty pleasure. I’ve never met a chicken wing that I didn’t like to eat…oh yeah, I do B2B marketing, too.

That’s who I am. I’m not sure that information would fit on a marketing form, would it? 😉

I share my personal details at the top because I’d bet some of what I said connected with you on a human level. It’s likely that what I am about to say might make more sense now that you know what gets me out of bed in the morning. Professionally, I enjoy exploring the motivations and desires of humans. That’s my favorite part of my job.

I had 100+ conversations with other B2B marketers last year. Some of these conversations were in private and others made it on our podcast Modern Day Marketer. I’ve got 2 really big things that I’ve pulled away from these interactions. These 2 really big things are going to shape how we approach our roles and cut through the noise in a crowded B2B space.

These 2 really big things are:

1. Content distribution
2. The rise of the individual creator in B2B

My goal with the rest of this contribution is to give you confidence in these topics and also provide you with some talking points that you can take to your boss to get the conversation going.

Content distribution

Content distribution is the topic that most modern day marketers understand is important, but few have it mastered.

Unfamiliar?

It’s the art of taking your latest podcast episode, blog, video, ebook, or other content asset and sharing it across all of the channels where the people who you want to consume it are hanging out to learn. The old way was to hit publish and hope people find it. The new way is being on offense with your content.

If I could rewind the tape here is how I would get started working on this strategy:

• Dump the content factory mindset and realize quantity over quality isn’t the best way to find resonance with your audience
• Start following people like Ross Simmonds who are not only advocates for content distribution, but are building businesses around it
• Spend time researching channels and finding the places where your future customer goes to learn…we believe we are building one of these channels at The Juice (sign up for free)
• Build and develop relationships with the community, respond to questions, and share information in the DMs
• Create a distribution checklist: choose the channels that based on your research you want to invest your time into building
• Embrace a distribution workflow every time that you’ve created a new piece content
• Customize your message to each channel…remember your headline matters and copy matters!

Content distribution is important because of the mindfulness it puts on the consumer. This is not a batch and blast strategy. This is a concept that takes thought, research, and great copywriting to execute. It’s a strategy that works because it recognizes potential content consumers as real people and not just a row of data in your CRM.

The rise of the individual creator

During my exploration of the modern day marketer nothing stood out to me more than the rise of the individual creator in B2B. Brands that are giving their creators the runway to build their personal brands are benefiting from it.

Brands who “get it” understand their creators are their most important distribution channel. Because of distribution creators are now meeting their audience on Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack communities, and content is being exchanged in the DMs.

People want to learn from people. The rise of the individual creator allows brands to gain trust at a human level. There’s a reason why we read books from our favorite authors, watch specific news channels, or even follow the people we do on Twitter. It’s a trust thing and it’s been incredible to watch it evolve in B2B.

Take Goldcast for example. They are a virtual / hybrid events platform. If you can imagine this is an extremely crowded space with what’s happened to the way we work over the last couple of years.

Goldcast refuses to be just another commodity. They not only create amazing content (check out their Weekly CMO Diaries), but let their marketers create human connections.

I was mindlessly scrolling through LinkedIn last week and a post from Meisha Bochicchio created a pattern interrupt for me. Wait a minute…a real person, on video, promoting a topic that is relevant to not only me, but the entire community?

Creators are your distribution.

Creators are brand builders.

Creators are the face of your company.

Creators are in the business of winning hearts and minds.

Brands who realize that this is happening are not only gaining new customers.

They are creating long term relationships with them.

Try building an attribution model around that.

We recently launched the beta version of Creator Pages at The Juice. We believe that Creator Pages is an opportunity to humanize more B2B brands by empowering the individual creator and giving them access to a distribution channel where their future customers go to learn.

We learn a lot of things when we launch a new product into the world. For me, Creator Pages has confirmed the desire of B2B marketers and brands to stop marketing like it’s 2010 and start doing marketing in a more modern way.

It’s about being real. It’s about being human.

It’s about content, but it’s more about the connection that we can make with our content.

Stop waiting. Start the conversation around distribution.

It’s time to humanize your work. Your brand will benefit from it.

I create new content every week for The Juice around the individual creator, distribution, and other modern day marketing topics. If you are interested in learning more you can follow here.

—Brett

Thanks again to Brett for sharing what he's working on.

What did you think?

—Corey

p.s. do you want to be able to compare your marketing metrics with other SaaS companies? Fill out the State of SaaS Marketing Survey →​

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