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This Is My Favorite B2B Marketing Strategy:

Become The Top Resource For Your Ideal Customers.

Being the best resource for your prospects and customers is the most effective and defensible way to take over a category, IMO. 

The ingredients are:

• A strong POV (positioning, website, the overall company pitch)
• Becoming your own publisher (using channels like LinkedIn, articles, videos, community, events) to distribute that POV, and showing up regularly and consistently with new things to say, new resources for people to learn from
• Making your customers and early adopters the stars of your marketing (people want real examples from people like them; this is the best product marketing)

If you sell to HR → How do you become the top resource for HR managers?

CFOs →  Can you make managing stock options super easy, for instance? 

Content Marketers → What can you do to give them a leg up? 

That's what we're doing now with Exit Five – becoming the top resource for B2B marketers. The Exit Five community helps people get better at their jobs so they can get promoted and grow their careers, BUT, we also intentionally have free resources that people can engage with before they're ready to join the community. We put an incredible amount of time into these free resources to help our target audience, and obviously we feature community members on the podcast. 

I also saw this play out at Drift (B2B marketing) and Privy (e-commerce marketing). We wrote books, hosted dinners and events, created private communities, published interesting content, and created our own momentum (vs waiting for the "press" to write about us).

Real quick on the WHY behind all this:

When you add a ton of value to your customers and prospects (free of charge) you have good-will built from the outset. You don’t need to agonize over copywriting that will stop them mid-scroll, because the content you're sharing has value for them inherently.

Your sales team doesn’t have to claw their way to closing deals, bc the trust is there. I recently talked to a founder who knows that when people come inbound from LinkedIn, he’ll be able to close the deal, because they have already gotten value from his content.

Building this type of value gives people a reason to come inbound and engage. I don’t care how good your bottom of funnel content is, most people are just not in market for it. 

Building helpful content regardless of a prospect’s place in the funnel means that people will have spent hours with you prior to the sales conversation. And your competition doesn’t stand a chance. 

Some great examples of this for further research:

Refine Labs: 

If you’re not familiar, started as an agency which helped companies with demand gen and growth. Their podcast is great, and a primary value-add for their target buyers. Additionally, many of their executives invest time in posting helpful content on LinkedIn. 

Gong:

Devin and his team made data driven content that sales people could only get from Gong, and they promoted it like crazy on LinkedIn.

Metadata:

Events, podcast, masterclasses, slack community.

Hubspot:

I paid for Hubspot events out of pocket when I was a young marketer because it made my edge so much sharper. They taught so many marketers how to create an inbound engine.

I’ve heard people say that marketing leaders these days are coming up from Demand Gen or Product Marketing. I think the best people, really, are able to build a marketing strategy which creates invaluable support and resources for their buyers. 

I'm not a tactical marketing genius - I’m not an expert at SEO, ABM, product marketing, sales enablement, or demand generation.

But what I know how to do is to position the company as the top resource in a niche and turn the brand into a magnet for your ideal customers.

Hope you are having a productive week.

- Dave

PS. Are you reading? Reply back and let me know, I love getting replies... 

🎧 Podcast #103: B2B Marketing at Strava with Jonny Ross

Jonny Ross is Senior Manager, Brand Partner Marketing at Strava. Jonny has been responsible for building out a global B2B marketing function from scratch at a "consumer" company, and we talk about his role and learnings from his career as a B2B marketer.

Listen To The Episode Now on Spotify

Or find it everywhere you listen by searching "Exit Five" podcast

Join the Exit Five Community

Please join us in the new home for Exit Five (and our dedicated iOS + Android app). We have officially moved our community to Circle - our own private community on the web, with a dedicated mobile app for iOS and Android. It's bumping over there already and I've been loving the feedback from members so far.

Here's a video overview from me breaking down the new Exit Five community. You can join the community right now for free with a 7 day free trial and then choose monthly or annual billing (or to not join) after your trial. Hope to see you in there.

Thanks to the 2023 Exit Five presenting sponsors Demandwell (SEO) and Zapier (Automation).

Want to sponsor a future newsletter or learn more about other sponsorship opportunities with Exit Five? We're now planning sponsorships for 2024 - fill this form here.

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Exit Five, PO Box 4354, Burlington, Vermont 05406, USA

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