I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the benefits of being a marketer who works for a company that is building a product for other marketers. It affords me the opportunity to spend a large chunk of my week networking with other B2B marketers, finding opportunities to collaborate, and creating kick ass authentic content. It’s an absolute blast and many days feels like I am operating on a playground. I feel refreshed and rejuvenated and truly feel like I am with my people.
Another benefit that I haven’t spent as much time discussing is being a part of a team that is building a product for people like me and the opportunity that presents itself to offer feedback. We’ve got a small, but bright team of individuals who pour a ton of energy into making sure what we are building will be valuable to those using it. It’s VIP early access week at The Juice and this is the first chance of receiving real life feedback on the user experience of our platform. We were all together in the office yesterday getting REAL feedback from REAL marketers. It’s a thrilling experience and something that anyone who has helped contribute to an early stage company can relate to.
.jpeg)
The VIP early access launch and then general early access launch will be focused around the content consumer or what we like to call the member. These are the individuals who Alaina has been spending the last 6 months on building interest for our offering. These are the individuals who have been receiving The Blend (sign up here), our weekly newsletter to their inbox every Friday. Finally, these are the people who might have organically stumbled on what we’re doing through the content that we’ve been creating like the 3C Podcast. We decided early that we wanted to be a member first company and a majority of our energy has been focused on their experience.
The other side of the coin is The Juice for brands or the opportunity for B2B companies to use our platform as an extension of their audience. We believe B2B content experiences are stuck in the past, are marketing centric, and uninspiring. We are waking up everyday rethinking these content experiences and using our platform as a means to connect content consumers and content marketers in a more meaningful way.
I’ve spent a majority of my time at The Juice trying to understand the current state of B2B content experiences and identify how many marketers have the appetite for being a part of this change. The good news - there’s a lot of marketers who are ready and you can hear a lot of these conversations happening in public on the podcast. Unfortunately, it’s not all roses and many marketers are still stuck in the past. They are running the same B2B marketing playbook that helped their boss’ boss become the Chief Marketing Officer.
I’ve said it until I am The Juice Green in the face, but that looks like:
- SEO built for algorithms - an obsession with ranking
- Blogs written for keywords and not humans
- Running low quality content syndication campaigns to “capture leads”
- Distribution for quantity vs. quality
- Marketing F*c**&^% Forms
Is there a balance?
Of course, the expectation shouldn’t be flushing everything you’ve been taught down the toilet. There are guiding principles that we can all work towards in order to deliver a better experience for the people who you are lucky enough to enter the hemisphere of your brand.
Stop running your marketing for you, the marketer.
Start running your marketing for your future customer.
I’ll layer in a “how” behind this, but first I’ve got to mention an epiphany-like moment that struck me last week. I was getting back from a morning run and walking down my street to get ready for the day when my memory started jogging back from a conversation that I had the day before.
I had met with Kate, our first sales hire, during the previous day to do something of a brain dump about everything I was thinking about that might help her as she begins to approach the market and have conversations.
When the meeting was concluding she said to me, “If there is anything that strikes you that you think I should know about that might help me have better conversation then let me know.”
Her quote hit my memory when I was about a block from home and ran to my computer to start typing notes about everything that I knew about the marketers who have participated in our podcast and are the types of marketers who I believe are prioritizing their audience above their metrics.
What’s the difference between these two groups of marketers?
These are two different games. There’s short game marketers or those marketers who are engineered to generate quick wins over everything else. These are the individuals and companies who are running the marketer centric playbook that is on the brink of expiration.
The other game is longer. These marketers are those that value building brands and providing value to their future customers above all else. They come from a place of abundance and don’t get drunk on the latest attribution cocktail that is served up through social platforms abound. These are the B2B marketers who are a great fit for what we are building at The Juice. These marketers are long game marketers.
I hit the shower.
Grabbed my coffee and my morning 2 hard boiled eggs and banana breakfast and just started typing.
Qualities of Long Game B2B Marketers:
- Investing brand building and providing value to their communities
- Deliver a recurring show to their audience (e.g. Podcast or YouTube)
- Curate other people / brands content and post on their channels or through newsletters
- Employees carry company message through their channels
- Marketing leader or member of C-Suite is frequently a guest on shows or speaking at events
- Employees share and are active on Twitter or LinkedIn
- Access to their content is frictionless
- Publishing of their content is consistent
- Dedicated content team, but also pull in other members of the organization to share their voice
- Focus on distribution: Content team owns or has a close relationship with demand gen at making this happen
- Value collaboration opportunities with other brands
Literally, moments after I shipped these over to Kate for her review I looked at my inbox and I had a message from a previous 3C Podcast guest, Fio who is the producer of newsletter contentfolks. I always click into her emails because she’s easily got one of my favorite newsletters in the game. This week’s topic, are you playing the long or short content game?
Ironic, maybe?
On point, certainly.
After I was done reading her article I circulated it amongst my team and officially kicked off my campaign to activate the voice of the long game marketer as a top priority.
The more B2B marketers who hear from long game marketers the more B2B marketer will be able to provide value and less about setting traps for our audiences. The Juice is about to launch a content discovery platform that will create a frictionless content experience for consumers and tremendous opportunities for brands who are looking to level up from their old marketing playbook.
I can’t wait to share feedback on what we are hearing from other marketers when we release early access to the general public in a couple weeks. We welcome all B2B marketing and sales professionals to participate. If you are a marketing who lives and breathes content and considers yourself a long game player feel free to shoot me a message. DMs are always opened. 🧃
If you enjoy what we are doing we’d love for you to do a couple things:
