People-first go-to-market is the way.
There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t open up LinkedIn during my morning preparation and see Nick Bennett and Mark Kilens posting something about people-first go-to-market strategies. Their conviction is so strong that they decided to start TACK which is a media and marketing firm that helps businesses humanize their go-to-market strategies.
We’re marketing in an era where brand logos have taken a backseat to people’s faces. We want to learn from people…and in most cases we want to learn from people who we already have a connection to. I’m referring to a connection that goes beyond what LinkedIn facilitates when you add someone new. I’m talking about the engagement that goes down with other like-minded individuals in Slack communities, the DMs, Zoom, or even in real life!
The Juice’s digital event for August was “How to Grow Your Career Through Community” where Nick was a speaker and answered questions about how a people-first mindset can help grow community.
During the conversation Nick shares:
“When you think about it a tide shift needs to happen from a model that’s focused on partnering with software to a model that’s focused on partnering with people to grow. It’s a change from using a constrained approach to using a more agile approach…it’s a shift from focusing on just the process to focusing on the process + people”
I’ve been running a people-first strategy ever since I started at The Juice almost 3 years ago and it works. We’ve recorded 255 episodes of Modern Day Marketer with my marketing peers. The Juice’s people-first strategy has lead to:
🧃An extended network of real people at real companies who help us launch new content and new product
🧃Relationships that can lead to new conversations and new customers
🧃Collaboration opportunities that allow The Juice to extend our brand on new platforms
You can’t create a growth hack around relationships. If you read, listen, or watch someone giving you a tutorial on how to then run. Relationships aren’t scalable and shouldn’t be treated as a transaction. We need to nurture relationships to find growth. This can mean answering questions, collaborating on content, and even trying to find someone a new role when they need it.
We launched The State of the B2B Podcast Listener report a couple months ago. We analyzed nearly 20k podcast episodes on The Juice and used it as an opportunity to answer the question, “what do listeners really want from branded podcasts?”. This report was data driven, but also featured many hosts who I’d consider “my marketing peeps”.
My strategy was to lean into those relationships to make sure the report was seen by as many of the right people as possible. Here’s a 4 part people-first play you can run the next time that you launch something new:
- Feature your people and their work in whatever you’re launching
- Reach out to your people in advance to let them know they’re being featured and ask them if they would like early access of your new thing
- When you deliver your new thing to your people ask if they wouldn’t mind sharing
- Grab a coffee on launch day and enjoy the show
We had almost 30 people share the report on LinkedIn outside of The Juice. I just hit refresh on Mixpanel and the number of new members reading the report continues to climb. This doesn’t happen if we lead with the old way to do marketing and feature a bunch of brand logos.
The Juice is excited to share the people-first philosophy by partnering with TACK. There's not faster growing topic category on The Juice than People-First GTM. We’re excited about the people-first content TACK is building and ready to help distribute it to our audience. If you’re interested in learning more about how a people-first strategy can help your brand level up make sure you follow TACK on The Juice today.
People-first, logos later
Follow the People-First Topic Page on The Juice to learn more from TACK and other brands creating content on people-first strategies. 🧃
