I am typing this while sitting at the same kitchen table where exactly 1 year ago I started my journey at The Juice. I’ve learned a lot about marketing in the past year. It’s not been the tactical stuff like how to launch a campaign or how to drive more results through SEO. It’s been better understanding the role of the marketer in B2B and understanding how a modern mindset around approaching your audience is winning.
Let me rewind the tape back to the first couple of weeks of my onboarding at The Juice. I spent a ton of time observing interactions on social media, joining communities, and finding other channels where conversations about B2B marketing were happening. I quickly realized the mindset of the B2B marketer had dramatically changed. The biggest difference I noticed was that there was a shift towards providing frictionless value above all else. It was a move away from trapping your audience into the process that works for you. It was a move towards providing value first and making it as easy as possible to share information with your audience to establish trust. This was a good change. Also, it made me curious about why some marketers were doing it the modern way and why others were still stuck with the old.
It took about 2 weeks into my journey at The Juice when I started reaching out to individuals that I’d see online to better understand the motivations and desires behind how they were operating. My process was very simple:
- I started making a list of people who I was learning from in these communities
- I’d message them about something they were sharing and ask if they’d spend 15 minutes on Zoom so I could ask some questions
- I’d create a new connection and learn something about how marketers were pushing their brands forward through value driven content design and distribution
I’m a career B2B marketer. I’ve been in almost every functional role over the past decade. I’ve been in direct sales support roles, cut my teeth in demand gen, been the content guy, and lead brand building efforts for companies. I’ve worked for startups, companies that were in hyper growth mode, and publicly traded companies. These companies all served different audiences and I’ve had to learn about a lot of different industries. I started my career marketing to marketers and was back for the first time in 6 years.
My absence from serving the marketing community was the biggest reason I started reaching out to people to learn. In the first month I understood that marketers doing it the modern way were prioritizing accessibility and trust building practices. This made sense to me, but I wanted to dig a couple layers deeper to understand why this was taking place.
Here were some of my biggest observations:
- The rise of the individual creator: content people had more influence than ever before - people trust people before they trust brands
- Marketing forms were dying and frictionless content experiences were winning - forms were anti-accessibility and represented the old way to do business
- Brands were prioritizing creating great experiences for their audiences over pushing them through their process - marketers were sacrificing small short term gains for long term incremental results
These themes began to crystalize with each conversation and I knew that there was an opportunity to start sharing what I was learning with the audience that we had just started to build. It took me about a month into this journey to launch the 3C Podcast (Curating Content Creators). I wanted to create a show that highlighted the people creating content behind some of the most successful brands in B2B. My goal was to share their ideas with anyone who had signed up to become a member of The Juice, signed up for our newsletter, or came across a post from our Twitter page.
After 95 episodes, tons of new marketing buddies, and a lot of lessons learned I believe we accomplished the first phase at helping humanize B2B through the themes we were observing.
The one thing I didn’t realize along the way that through this exploration I was going to find the hero in the story that we are telling at The Juice.
It’s the Modern Day Marketer.
If you’ve been listening to the show you’ve heard me investigate the Modern Day Marketer and I’ve even broken down the traits that make up these individuals. Because there is so much more left to learn about these individuals we have decided to dedicate our attention to the exploration.
Today, the 3C Podcast evolves into Modern Day Marketer.
We will stick to the same format of dropping new shows every Monday and Friday. We will continue to bring on guests to explore content. We will continue to find ways to share what we learned outside of these episodes in other content formats.
The biggest change and challenge that we will be exploring is how the Modern Day Marketer can transcend beyond just the marketing department and into the entire business. I’m excited about the fresh coat of paint that we are putting on the show.
I can’t wait to share more voices in 2022. Pumped that you are along for the journey.
Welcome to Modern Day Marketer. 🧃
If you enjoy what we are doing we’d love for you to do some things:
