I had an offer sitting in my inbox and a decision to make.
Jonathan had been on a mission of talking to 100 marketers in 100 days to get feedback on a problem that wanted to solve for a business that he was in the early stages of creating. I was one of the marketers on his list. I knew Jonathan from our time at ExactTarget and had a lot to say about what he was working on. Ironically, I still have a lot to say and that’s why building out our content at The Juice has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.
Let me rewind the tape back to those early conversations with Jonathan. His vision for the business centered around solving the problem that finding good B2B content is time intensive and the return on investment isn’t worth it. I would bet you’ve felt this way at some point in your career.
We want to grow in our professional careers and great content can help. The problem is that it’s a pain in the ass to find and if we stumble on something interesting we are forced to jump through a bunch of traps to consume it. What’s even worse is that most of the time the content falls flat and we are reminded about it by the never-ending sales cadence we get put in.
There’s got to be a better way, right?
Jonathan believed so. His conviction ran so strong that I was sold. I signed the offer letter in December of 2020. I had a desire to help usher in a new era around content experience in B2B. A way for sales and marketing professionals to get better connected to great content from the most trusted brands in the world.
I started as the marketing leader on January 4, 2021. We were going by a pseudonym and didn’t even have a product built yet. When I look back on it now I must have had as much conviction as Jonathan or he’s just really good at sales…probably a combination of both.
Little did I know that a couple of weeks after starting in my role Google would make an announcement phasing out third party cookies. This was a shift that would impact a lot of marketers, but helped us validate the demand for better content experiences.
The Cookie has Crumbled
There’s been a tremendous amount of coverage from industry leading brands when it comes to the downfall of third party cookies and what moves marketers can make to adjust with the times. If you are looking for more information on the history of third-party cookies you can check out this piece by Terminus.
The problem with third party cookies was a whole lot of greed and a lack of consent. Our data was regularly being bought and sold without our knowledge. These exchanges would pour gasoline on an already growing dumpster fire experience we had to deal with at consumers.
I used to receive at least 5 unsolicited calls a day from vendors. I’d pick up sometimes for a break in the day and most of the reps on the other end of the phone couldn’t even explain what their company did.
The email outreach was even worse. I’d have to plan a weekly purge of my inbox just to stay ahead of it.
I got my MBA in marketing at ExactTarget. I watched the business go from hypergrowth >> publicly traded >> acquired by Salesforce in my first real marketing job out of college.
That’s not normal, but being a part of that type of success helped shape who I am as a marketer. More importantly, I still live by one of the core values that our company rallied around.
STAY TRUE TO PERMISSIONS
This means that it’s never about taking the shortcut in marketing. Great marketing isn’t about amassing quantity. The transactional mindset of blasting an email list hoping that someone responds is just bad marketing. It makes your brand look stupid and doing it consistently is the easiest way to lose traction in market.
It will take time to see the positive impact of the downfall of third party cookies. The best part of its demise is that it forces marketers to seek consent from its users before using their data. We have entered an era where the opt-in is cool again and excited about how we are using it to create better content experiences at The Juice.
The Zero Party Data of It All
We are launching Intent Signals at The Juice next week. I’ve been writing about why I am excited about the outputs that these will create for marketers and how I think it will lead to a more productive relationship with sales. This is great for marketers who are using The Juice to build brand awareness, grow their audience, distribute content, or modernize their demand gen efforts, but what does this mean for consumers?
The primary reason that I joined The Juice was because of our vision to create a better content experience for consumers. We’ve all dealt with the bad and are dedicated to eliminating the roadblocks that hinder professional growth through great content.
2 of the biggest problems in the current state are:
- Accessibility: It’s an absolute pain to find the right content for the right role without having to jump through hoops
- Content overload: The proliferation and investment in content marketing causes there to be too much content for consumers to navigate – our future customers are overwhelmed by this experience
We’ve taken a zero-party data approach to the way we’ve designed The Juice from the jump. If you are not familiar with zero-party data I’d recommend this article from Salesforce where it’s clearly defined.
We’re building a content curation and distribution platform for B2B sales and marketing professionals. In order to alleviate the accessibility and overload problems we source our new members during the onboarding process at The Juice to create a better content experience.
The thing that I like most about gathering zero party data from your members is that it’s a point of validation that your brand is trusted. We spend a lot of time on building the brand at The Juice. The goal of every piece of content that we produce is simple. It’s to educate, gain affinity, and ultimately establish trust with our audience. I like to believe that the energy we put into our content program makes it less likely that new members abandoned the onboarding process.
New members trust The Juice and it’s our job to make sure that we follow through with a better content experience than what they are experiencing before they signed up.
Here’s some of the ways that we are using zero-party data to create a better content experiences for our members on The Juice:
- We use job function + seniority to tail member’s “Popular With” section of the homepage to show what their actual peers are consuming - this is our way to avoid everyone getting general marketing or sales content
- We tailor featured content to the exact persona that the content was designed for
- We tailor our follow recommendations based on job function (e.g. “here are other brands and creators that Growth Marketers follow)
The Juice is the largest library of B2B sales and marketing resources in the world. We are taking a zero-party data approach because we believe it helps shrink the massive sea of content and creates a better experience for members.
The better experience includes introduction to the right type of content for you from the brands and creators building content for you. Brands benefit because their content hits a higher quality audience than what they are receiving from their out-of-date content syndication program. Members benefit from getting easier, quicker access to content built for them.
Access to data is essential in order to deliver a better, more personalized content experience for B2B marketing and sales professionals. We believe in a better way and understand the responsibility that is required to create better connections with brands and people looking for professional growth.
We’ll continue to err on the side of transparency and consent from our members.
It will come out in articles like this, podcast episodes, newsletters, or through collaborations with other marketers. We are here to create a better content experience for B2B marketing and sales professionals. We’ll be out here creating content while we do it.
Not a member yet? Join The Juice and start learning from creators and brands who are pushing B2B forward. 🧃
