Trigger Points

Elevating B2B Marketing Through Insightful, Educational Content

• Hired Guns Agency • Season 2024 • Episode 1

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Our first episode of Trigger Points is an insightful conversation that peels back the layers of content creation, revealing how a rich professional background can inform powerful marketing strategies. Shaun Raines, shares his journey from the fast-food frontline to marketing maverick, underscoring the value of each career experience in shaping his approach to niche marketing. His insights into Hired Guns Agency's focus on educational content show us how the right message can not only reach the right audience but also turn listeners into loyal customers.

The marketing landscape is constantly shifting, and this episode stays ahead of the curve, tackling the common traps B2B marketers face. Are you pouring resources into attracting eyes without securing conversions? We dissect a case study where subject matter expertise amplifies SEO and social media efforts, emphasizing the importance of quality engagement over sheer numbers. Listen as we dissect the nuances of marketing to different sectors within the automotive industry, offering laser-focused strategies that go beyond the generic and drive home results.

As we look at B2B marketing's future, Shaun champions the art of experimentation and advocates for content that educates. He lays out the blueprint for success, blending SEO savvy with smart social media tactics, all while warning of the common pitfalls like missteps in LinkedIn advertising. Get ready to transform your marketing playbook with Shaun's expertise, as we equip you with the strategies to forge authentic connections, educate your market, and leave an indelible mark on your industry.

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Podcast Directed and Produced by Hired Guns Agency, of course: https://www.hiredgunsagency.com

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Trigger Points, the Hired Guns Agency podcast, where we explore the strategies that make or break marketing in the business-to-business world. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host for our inaugural episode as we dive deep with Sean Raines, our CEO here at Hired Guns Agency. But before we get started, let me give you a little bit of a. I think I'm going to say hi, Sean, up here, because it just felt a little more natural for me to say hi, Sean, there.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

And just say hi, don't ask me, don't say how are you, or anything like that. I won't Okay. Okay, let's start over. Okay, take two. Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Trigger Points, the Hired Guns Agency podcast, where we explore the strategies that make or break marketing in the business to business world. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host for our inaugural episode as we dive in deep with Sean Raines, our CEO here at Hired Guns Agency. Hi, sean.

Speaker 2:

Hi Crystal.

Speaker 1:

Well, before we get started, let me give you a little background on our founder. With a rich history of leadership positions within the automotive industry, sean is a seasoned professional in sales and marketing. Past employers include DealerOn Reach Local and Reynolds Reynolds, where he has an extensive background in driving marketing success. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to start his ventures dealer, superhero and alliance before establishing Hired Guns Agency. Well, I want to start right where I left off, with Hired Guns Agency and with this being our first episode of Trigger Points, the official Hired Guns podcast. Why don't you begin by letting us know exactly what the Hired Guns Agency is?

Speaker 2:

I'd be happy to so.

Speaker 2:

Hired Guns is essentially a content creation agency.

Speaker 2:

We focus on producing podcasts that showcase the expertise of businesses, so it spotlights their thought leadership, and that's just really kind of the beginning of the strategy, because it's so far beyond just using the podcast.

Speaker 2:

The podcast becomes a long form foundation piece to make smaller content from. So we carefully extract all the insightful information from all of the episodes and then we use that as the marketing arsenal that connects the message of your subject matter experts to your audience, which is extremely important because a lot of businesses don't realize especially if they're in niche markets, don't realize, especially if they're in niche markets, that the struggle for inbound marketing success is typically because either inside of their own marketing teams or if they have hired an agency or maybe there's a combination of both the agencies usually struggle to have success because they don't have the subject matter expertise. There is no thought leadership, typically within the marketing teams, and that becomes a really big miss. And we solve those problems by generating very clear, focused, inspired educational content from the experts inside of your business or inside of the businesses that we serve. That's what Hired Guns does.

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm very excited to be part of Hired Guns and I want you to talk about it a little bit more a little later in the podcast. But first I want to explore your career a little bit more, since we're starting this off here with our first episode. So let me ask you what roles in your career helped make you a subject matter expert in sales and marketing.

Speaker 2:

It always makes me feel a little awkward to say, well, I'm a subject matter expert in really anything. But I guess if you spend enough time and I think there's that once you're 10,000 hours in, you're an expert, and I certainly have many more hours than that in both sales and marketing. But specifically the roles, I would say definitely Reynolds. Reynolds, from a sales perspective, reach Local and DealerOn were probably the three companies that helped me become a subject matter expert around sales. I could certainly go in deeper on that, but those three roles were similar but different in terms of selling. Similar but but different in terms of, uh, of selling all b2b, um, all selling from those companies to, in the automotive industry, to dealers, um, some similar strategies and some were different, um, but I'll just a tremendous amount of experience over, you know, several years. I think if you were to bake all of those companies um together in terms of the time that I was there, that's probably close to 15 years with all three of those companies. Maybe a little shy of that.

Speaker 2:

From a marketing perspective, I have to say every job I've ever been blessed to have has helped me become an expert in marketing Because hindsight 2020, you know, there are, you hear a lot of people say I never look back, I'm always looking forward. I just heard Dana White from the UFC actually say that after the UFC 300 event this weekend and I understand what you're what they're saying and I think if you were to talk to people that say that, they wouldn't disagree with what I'm about to say. But I look back all the time and it's not because I want to go back to those previous roles, it's not because the scenario there was so much better. It's because I always want to learn from previous efforts. I always know that there's something back there that was perhaps successful, but sometimes it's the things that didn't work that if you didn't learn from them, then you're destined to repeat them work. That if you didn't learn from them, then you're destined to repeat them.

Speaker 2:

So every single job that I can ever think of, from the first job I ever had at mcdonald's sorry for the disclosure of that, I was 15 at the time, I didn't know any better but yeah, from mcdonald's and watching what marketing does to, uh, you know, the food industry all the way to way to the last corporate jobs that I had, which also were very much tied to specific marketing efforts that I learned from including things that worked and things that didn't really work. So I would say my marketing subject matter expertise has really come from every single job I've had, and I've always been a creative person so I've always been interested in what connects with people and what helps a business connect with its target audience. So I would say that's probably every single job I've had has helped me become a good marketer.

Speaker 1:

Well, and you have decades of experience specifically in the automotive industry. But do you think that, taking the experience you've had and launching into a hired guns agency, that can be relative to other industries? How do you feel about your experience going out of automotive and how can it relate to other industries as well?

Speaker 2:

Great question. I feel really good about it. I know there are some industries that I would probably have no problem disclosing that I feel like a fish out of water. There are adjacent industries, obviously, to automotive that I already have done a lot of work in and I'm very comfortable in. I think most people would know that I'm going to say RV industry, power sports industry, that being motorcycles but we've already just in preparing hired guns to kind of go to market and be available.

Speaker 2:

We have clients right now that are in healthcare and wellness, where we work with even small local businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that have been wildly successful in driving new business and helping them do the exact same thing that I just mentioned, which is taking their subject matter experts and creating all of this helpful content to their target audience. So my confidence level is probably delusional, but it's very high in terms of being able to help businesses far outside of the automotive industry because the basic foundational practices, tactics, strategies aren't really bound by any one particular vertical. They work in a lot of different verticals. So, yeah, I would definitely say we already are helping businesses very far outside of the automotive industry.

Speaker 1:

Definitely. Well, you've been at the forefront of marketing and sales for years. Let's talk about how things have changed, though. So, looking back over the last 10 years, how have you seen B2B marketing evolve and why do you think the landscape has shifted?

Speaker 2:

know this because you've been on the ride with me. But within the last 10 years, just for me personally, I was kind of forced I don't know it ended up being that was the providence of my life was to be more involved on the B2B side. So I've been paying attention to the B2B side for longer than the last 10 years, but inside of the last 10 years I've definitely noticed a lot of big as you mentioned, like what's shifted in the landscape, and so for a lot of people, b2b marketing remains the same in their company. They're not doing really anything different than they've done 10 or even for the last 15 or 20 years. They've done 10 or even for the last 15 or 20 years, but it has changed.

Speaker 2:

Relative to content creation and what people refer to as dark social, which I'll just the quick explanation of dark social is there's so much that happens within the comments, within a LinkedIn post or a Facebook post, that isn't trackable. There's no attribution model that will capture that. When you post a piece of content, let's just say on LinkedIn, you write a really great piece and somebody let's just say you're catering to the automotive industry and you offer up a piece of subject matter expertise in a post and somebody from your target audience puts a comment in there that says, oh, this is really interesting. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you happen to go and notice this. If you're paying attention, if you're marketing and really your sales team if they're looking at what's going on in the dark social can't attribute it just what conversation's happening you'll realize that the content you create, the more on target it is for your audience, the more you will find that what happens on the social side that's really not trackable is actually very beneficial to your business. So, moving on from that and we can get into that in either further episodes, I'm certainly happy to talk to people that might be interested in that element of this.

Speaker 2:

But another change relative to marketing is in the sales organization. Certainly in my last 10 to 15 years most B2B scenarios they have a marketing department that's primarily working to generate leads. It's not that dissimilar, actually, from car dealers who are constantly I always say it's lead addiction. They're so addicted that they sometimes believe that more leads solves all problems. But this is not just a car dealer problem where they want more and more leads.

Speaker 2:

Most of the businesses out there are constantly, you know, they set up a sales system and a marketing system that basically shows that the marketing team needs to be focused on one thing go and generate leads, leads, leads. On the B2B side they'll call them MQLs, which is your market or marketing qualified lead. And as soon as those get generated they get basically handed off into a process or a system that's all sales driven, which typically is an inside sales person. You might be familiar with other acronyms of SDRs, but essentially these are inside sales rules that are taking the market qualified leads and they're basically trying to warm them up. They use outbound methods until they can mark that lead as dead, like it's not going to close or not going to be interested. Or, if they can warm it up, they pass it on to either another person or perhaps the salesperson, maybe an account executive who's responsible to demo that prospect and hopefully close the business.

Speaker 2:

That is very, very common, but in the last 10 or 15 years even some of that's changing because people are starting to wake up and they realize that a bigger breakthrough for both marketing and sales teams in the B2B world is content creation and specifically it's subject matter expertise that's driving inbound interest for those companies and so it turns into more of a marketing role today, which is a big shift, is smart marketing teams are about creating demand and figuring out how to capture the demand versus lead gen, lead gen, lead gen.

Speaker 2:

It's not that lead gen isn't bad. It's not that you don't want to generate leads, but when you educate and you help your target audience, they will come to you instead of the expensive outbound strategies, which means that you got to spend a lot of money on a whole lot of people that basically exert a lot of energy and you have to pay these people to do all these things for a pretty unsuccessful take rate or closing percentage. So that outbound strategy that's been popular for at least 10 or 15 years. Some people are starting to wake up and realize that they need to add a content strategy that helps actually educate their audience. That's been a big shift that started in the last few years and I think we're just still kind of at the tip of the iceberg of it.

Speaker 1:

Well, you touched a little bit on content creation. Can you talk a little more about the evolution of it and the importance of adapting to change there?

Speaker 2:

Yeah for sure. So there are a lot of companies that they struggle with Well, how are we going to make that type of content? And so you might have people in your marketing team that are. There are so many marketing tools, softwares out there now that you can put just about anybody in a position and give them a handful of tools. And I'm not talking about graphic designers that are going to be an illustrator or Photoshop, but I'm talking about simple tools like Canva. Canva is a great marketing tool, but it will make people that aren't necessarily marketing in terms of their thought processes or even their experiences of running lots of campaigns. It'll give them a set of tools to make content and to a lot of businesses, content creation is just the banner ads that they make.

Speaker 2:

Content creation is well, we changed up our Facebook profile image and that is content, but what they're missing is that the real valuable content, and what's evolving is actually making content specific for your target audience, because they'll respond to it. So you can't I mean I hate to say it because it's not meant to make anybody feel bad, but it's a little bit lazier to make content the way that you were making it in 2018 or pre-COVID years that type of content. What people get frustrated, what businesses get frustrated with, ceos get frustrated with, the C-suite gets frustrated with, is when you're making content and the marketing team can't actually show that it's elevating any metric. That's important, meaning revenue is not growing based on this content creation, your brand isn't growing, your recognition isn't growing, your sales aren't growing. So when you have all of that going on, the likelihood is that the type of content you're making or creating is the wrong content.

Speaker 2:

So the evolution today is and again, it's a small percentage of people, so the ones that are on the front of this right now are still going to have a very successful ride for probably still a few years. And that is content creation that is absolutely built to help your target audience Like who is it that you sell to? Okay, make content that's going to make them really happy and it's going to be helpful to them. That's huge, that's a big, that's a big evolutional change right now in content creation.

Speaker 1:

That's so helpful. I want to focus now on the common pitfalls, though, that many companies fall into when they approach B2B marketing, so will you share your perspective on why many marketing strategies fail to hit their mark and how companies can avoid these common mistakes?

Speaker 2:

avoid these common mistakes? Sure, let me preface this with saying I'm not anti-paid search. People that will watch and that consume my content, especially people that know me from the industry, will know of even my own personal experience in companies that I work with that sell a lot of paid search. So I'm not anti-paid search or SEO, but some of those common mistakes. Based on your question, paid search is for B2B specifically. This isn't me talking about paid search for businesses that sell direct to consumer or B2C. There are a lot of places in B2C where paid search is absolutely one of the tools I would choose if that were the marketing tasks in front of me. But the places where some of the strategies are failing to hit the mark in B2B paid search, because there are a lot of companies, depending on how big you are, you'd be surprised and perhaps even nauseated to see how much money is allocated in budget for paid search with little to, sometimes no ability to capture the return on that investment. So you are spending some thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, because one of the things you get in paid search immediately in from a B2B perspective is it oftentimes, if you put enough money into the machine and the Google machine, paid search will become your number one source of traffic to your website, and that's what a lot of these businesses are like. We need more traffic. We need more traffic. It's true, you need traffic right. Just because you build a website doesn't mean anybody's going to visit it, and paid search is typically the fastest way to bring people onto your site. But what ends up happening for a lot of businesses is they realize that those paid search visits are not resulting in sales. People aren't converting, they're not calling the business, they're not filling out a form, they're not doing business with you. And so if you have 50, 60% of your traffic to your website is paid search and none of it is really moving the needle. If you were to compare the same percentage of your traffic to your website is paid search and none of it is really moving the needle. If you were to compare the same percentage of your traffic that came direct or that came just through regular SEO, there is a big difference in that, and a lot of companies don't actually measure the difference between the two. If they did, they would either shave off that paid search budget or, in some cases, they wouldn't do it at all on a B2B side, but paid search SEO is also a big miss On the B2B side. Usually SEO is a big miss.

Speaker 2:

We have a client that we've been working with that we really kind of built hired guns with them as the primary model. I'll just I don't mind sharing that with Stralet. They're an outsourced automotive BDC company, so they provide basically sales process services to dealers. They're really good at it. They've been at it a long time. Their founder and CEO was in automotive retail, meaning he worked for one of the largest automotive groups in the country for years and years and years, and one of the things that was a problem that needed to be solved for them was how do you come up with a better SEO strategy for a niche that's a deeply niched business, right? They don't have a market audience like Nike or Starbucks, right? They have basically the franchise dealers in the country. That's pretty much their audience, so now you're in the tens of thousands. An SEO strategy for them, though, that has worked remarkably well has been one where they took subject matter, expertise, content and they use it to fuel what they're going to write and what they're going to put into their own website, and it's been really fun actually to work with them in that regard, because they're absolutely annihilating their part of the auto space from those perspectives. But that's a miss for a lot of companies. They just don't understand well what do we have to do from an SEO perspective, because it's likely very different than what they know about local SEO. Right, big difference. Local SEO is probably not going to do a lot of good for a national or an international-based company.

Speaker 2:

Social media falls into the same category in terms of strategies that often fail to hit their mark. Rented audiences and this is a topic probably for another whole podcast, but it's probably one of the biggest temptations, especially when you're desperate as a company. We need attention, we need notoriety, we need visibility, we need to be recognized, to go to the people that you think have the best, biggest audiences. They're popular, everybody loves them and maybe we could draft off of that, maybe we could rent that audience and maybe you'll even write a check for that. And again, sometimes you'll have temporary success with that, but long term, renting another audience is just something that I would tell businesses. If it gives you a little notoriety to jump into another audience because you're going to add some value there, that's great. But your expectations of other audiences need to be set properly, otherwise, again, really, really big miss and they'll definitely not hit their targets. Hit their targets.

Speaker 2:

And then the last couple of things I'd say on this. I know it's a long winded answer, but live events is another area where a lot of B2B companies like trade shows. They don't always have to be the big ones, but those are also another area where people they fail to miss the target and we can get into the depths of why that is. Because this is again, it's not me saying that any of these things that you shouldn't do any of them, but they are common places where a lot of failures happen. And you have to think about live events, trade shows, and plan and strategize for them in a way that's realistic. And a lot of the B2B companies that are heavy into events, they don't do that, and I'll just give you two quick examples. Most of the companies, especially in automotive, have started to do things over the last several years where it's the biggest event of the year, and what do you do? You try to put all these. It's content creation, but it's content that says, hey, take a demo with us at our booth and we'll give you $100 or $100 gift card. Those people that are taking those demos are not wanting to become your customer. There's not a high level of intent by those people. But we spend a lot of money and then we fail to hit the mark and we were like and most companies don't even want to talk about the ROI they get from events, so that can be a miss.

Speaker 2:

Email marketing is also an area that I'll mention, and the reason for that is because I'm a fan of email marketing. We have a couple of clients that we do email marketing for. The problem is if you don't have a methodology to continue to grow your email marketing database right. So if you're not capturing more email addresses really every day, like it's part of your strategy, and you bought a list or you procured a list from Zoom info or Hunter or whatever tool you're using out there Again, I'm not saying that those are bad things, but if that's what you've done for your strategy, then you have a limited number of email addresses and the more fancy you decide to get with your email campaigns let's just say heavy segmentation or long nurturing campaigns that might have four or five or more touch points you have to be honest with yourself and ask is your target audience? Maybe there's 20,000 potential customers for what you do. Are they going to say, you know what, now that you sent me that sixth email, I definitely want to buy your stuff. That never happens. Nobody ever says that, it's just you know. So it's getting outside or getting beyond.

Speaker 2:

Some of that old school thinking will help people, and email marketing is something that I'm a fan of, but it has to be done right, and you have to understand all of the variables and the nuances of your business, your email marketing list and what you're trying to accomplish. Most people, if they're not just grabbing the hand raisers for quick leads, then they're doing long nurture campaigns, which can be helpful, but they have to be done the right way, and you don't want to do that if you don't have a constant influx of new email addresses, and a lot of them and I'm not talking about hundreds, I'm talking about tens of thousands that keep coming in. So, yeah, and I would say the only way to avoid some of those things is you have to try to be different, right, and it shouldn't be hard for all the things that I just kind of gave some thoughts on. It shouldn't be hard for all the things that I just kind of gave some thoughts on. It shouldn't be that hard when you consider and I would tell every B2B marketers know this, but the CEOs or the decision makers of like we need to make something different.

Speaker 2:

They need to consider the fact that all new marketing tactics and strategies almost all of them are experimentation. You try something that you've never tried before, and if you can try some things that you trust from someone that told you, hey, this is worth it. And here are a couple of examples of when you do this experiment with this new marketing strategy, you should expect outcomes identical or at least similar to this. You at least have something to go on that makes you a little bit more comfortable with that experimentation. But you should absolutely be doing it because that's what you do every time. The first time you tried paid search, the first time you decided let's do email marketing, you were experimenting.

Speaker 1:

Well, I've heard you talk a lot. You didn't talk so much about it in the last question, but I've heard you talk a lot about failure to know your market, your audience. I love what you have to say about that, so can you talk just go a little deeper on that for B2B marketing.

Speaker 2:

And this is something that I didn't used to think about as much as I do now, but the last, I don't know how many years it never escapes my mind and I think about it almost on a daily basis. When you don't define who your market is and that would be we'll just stay with the automotive industry. If you sell something, a product, some software, a service to a car dealer, okay, so your target audience is a car dealer, but it doesn't stop there, because in the auto industry it's like well, does our product or service solve a problem or relieve the pain point experienced by just new car dealers, franchise dealers, Hondas, Toyotas, Fords or does it also help independent or used car dealers? Beyond that, does it help the adjacent industries? Does it work exactly the same? If you're RV, power sports, new car used car? There are companies out there that have services that would work splendidly for any of those categories. So, once you know your audience, keep it simple. Let's just say it's franchise car dealers, so new car dealerships, that's your market. That's a finite number.

Speaker 2:

But businesses, oftentimes, because they're maybe not that creative themselves, they're following the lead of other companies that they're impressed with and oftentimes those companies are following the lead of some other company that they're impressed with. And the more that you go back, the more you realize that a lot of these marketing tactics belong to huge brands I mentioned, you know, Disney or Starbucks or Nike. When your target audience is hundreds of millions of people, you get to do a lot of different things. From a marketing perspective, your budgets are also massively different than your. I'm a you know, a widget company that sells a widget to just the 20,000. It's not quite 20,000, 18, 17 or 18,000 new car dealers. That's your target market. You're going to think differently. Your budget's going to be radically different, and so if what you're trying to do is to break through to people through magic taglines, right, we can come up with all the unicorn taglines and that'll get somebody's attention. Not that great taglines don't get people's attention. But if your whole strategy is to you know, to come up with something similar to you know, just do it. Well, you don't have a swoosh on a bunch of sneakers that people have iconically fell in love with for years, and they've had people like Michael Jordan make Air Jordans way back in the day. Actually, it was one of the best Christmas presents I ever got Red, black and white original Jordans. I have old pictures as a teenager.

Speaker 2:

If you're selling products and services to dealers, you don't want to try to market yourself like that. That's why I tell people all the time understanding who your target, who your audience, who your customer is is extremely important. The failure to clearly define that means that you'll never be able to clearly define your value to the market, to your customer. And if you don't know that audience, you're going to have problems from the very, very, very beginning. How do you fix it? Well, it's kind of just reverse engineer the things that I'm saying. You have to know your customer. You have to know their problems. You have to know what pain points they have. I feel like a broken record when I'm talking to businesses about this stuff, because it's unfortunately too much of a common miss. Stay on message what does your customers need, what problems do they have and where's their pain, and then connect your solution to their problems. Apply your relief to the pain they're experiencing. If you miss that, you will spend a lot of time and a lot of money on a road to nowhere.

Speaker 1:

Well then, what's one piece of advice you would give a company that is struggling to make an impact with its marketing efforts?

Speaker 2:

Remove it has zero marketing experience, like just they can't be in the room, they just it's the marketing by consensus is just it's a terrible idea and everyone thinks they're a marketer. I've I've had this experience in multiple companies Everybody. I used to be one of them. When I didn't do a lot of marketing and I did more business development sales, I had marketing ideas. Some people have great ideas and they were made for it Really creative people oftentimes. But you've got to remove everyone that has zero marketing experience.

Speaker 2:

That's not me saying you shouldn't try new stuff, because I just said a few minutes ago you absolutely should be experimenting. That's part of marketing. It is absolutely essential to try new things strategies, tactics, techniques but a whole lot of ships sink trying to sail on ideas from people who have never even been on a boat. And if you don't remember that when you're having these marketing conversations and everybody wants to share their opinions, you're going to be very frustrated, you're going to waste a lot of money and you'll be in the exact same place that you've always been and I try to help people. It's a slippery slope to try to tell people hey, I love your sales team, they're nice people, nothing personal, but I see this a lot on the B2B side. Nice people, nothing personal, but I see this a lot on the B2B side and I've done, not just since I've been running my own businesses, but I've been a participant in this.

Speaker 2:

When sales struggles, for whatever reason, the market might be down, the economy's not hot, inflation's up. Whatever the reason is that your sales team is struggling or you're just not being able to put deals on the board. It could be a whole varied bunch of reasons why. But when the desperation and when the frustration sets in, sales is usually the first group of people who start to look for somehow to deflect the attention, the negative attention, of not being able to move the needle forward. Now, this is me also saying it's not always the sales team's fault. Sometimes it is, you know, like if you have really lazy or entitled salespeople that had one great season and they hit 40 home runs one year, but now they think they can keep doing. They've only done it one year.

Speaker 2:

Oftentimes that's a person who is very heavily relying on a marketing team that just churns out tons of MQLs and they're hoping that that inside sales function churns up things and warms them up for them to go and put deals on the board because they're a great closer or whatever is going on in your organization. So if that exists in your business, you just need to be aware of that and be really careful, because it's not a good idea to listen to people that don't have that experience. So, anyway, from there I would say immediately, start creating content that helps, that teaches, that improves the lives of your audience. Like that is like. Just start doing that immediately, because when you educate and you assist those that you're wanting to reach, you will be pleasantly surprised I would use the word delighted by the results and just as a little you know.

Speaker 2:

Additional point I got an uh just yesterday. That was in regards to some keywords relative to I was talking about strawlet and you can go look for yourself automotive bdc cost. We specifically chased that variation of automotive bdc, of BDC, on page one of Google Strahd occupies 15 spots and I think 13 of them are video thumbnails of content that we created from their subject matter expertise. As I already mentioned, they have a CEO, founder, vinny, who's an expert in what he does, and so just him taking the time to create a long form piece of content allows so much more to get out there in front of all the sales efforts because they're educating and being helpful to their target audience. Yeah, you'll be delighted by the results. You just got to do it. It's really important, but you got to do it so true.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's look towards the future. Um what's your take on upcoming trends in b2b marketing and content creation?

Speaker 2:

they kind of just mentioned that. I'm a really big fan of taking subject matter expertise and turning that into your best content. So content creation from subject matter expertise leads to to thought leadership. Whoever you are, whatever industry you're in, whatever niche within that industry you serve, you definitely need to follow this trend and again, we're at the tip of the iceberg on this, especially in automotive. There are people making content, but the way they're going about it is not what I would recommend. It's what everyone's been doing or it's been whatever they did at previous companies. It's a lot of same same same.

Speaker 2:

So take that long form foundational piece whatever it is for you and use that to create a lot of your micro pieces of content. So imagine capturing upcoming trend. Upcoming trend is really be aware of the fact that you need to educate your audience. So what are the topics that speak about? The things that your customers struggle with, where they need help, and then use your subject matter expertise to capture a long form discussion, an interview that inspires, all the other things that you can do.

Speaker 2:

You can use that to make video pieces of content long form, short form. You can use that to start podcasts. You can use that for all sorts of different written content, instead of letting ChatGPT write everything for you. Not that there's anything wrong with lots of the marketing stuff for AI these days, but if you want to be able to write really great pieces, that's one of the ways to do it and it's going to be authentic. It's not going to feel like it missed a little bit of the nuance of your niche because it was written by ChatGPT and not you. So those are things that I would say that's kind of my take on that trend Jump into that, lean into that hard. That's going to help your business for sure.

Speaker 1:

That's great. So, based on your expertise, what are the key components of a successful B2B marketing strategy for the future?

Speaker 2:

Admittedly, this is self-serving, but along with the standards like SEO, maybe some paid search or maybe some paid Google, maybe some paid social, uh, likely at least in B2B, uh, linkedin ads. Um, specifically, know what to do with your LinkedIn ads. I see a lot of companies, especially in automotive vertical, that their B2B sponsored ads are trashed. And I can already I can just look at their ad and say I know that they're not getting any engagement, they're not driving leads, they're basically doing the same kind of repulsive stuff, like you weren't invited to the party but you're trying to force your way in type of stuff. And now people are like why does it not work, Although we've known that this doesn't work for years? So I would say, along with those standards though, some SEO, some paid search, b2b ads, so you're not selling. Your target isn't hundreds of millions of people, it's 20,000 or maybe it's only 15,000. It's very, very small.

Speaker 2:

Knowing that, of course, is important, but when you're deeply niched, your content creation strategy needs to be very on point. It needs to be one that elevates your audience, one that helps your audience. It's like they watched your content, they consumed your content and it was helpful to them, it educated them, it brought them to a place that I wasn't thinking about that before. So businesses that are basically doing that, they're not just making an impression. Impressions are great. I remember hearing this in a sermon one Sunday Impressions are not achievements. I've never forgot that statement because it had nothing to do with digital marketing, but my marketing brain is probably 10 years ago. I remembered that, and it's true Impressions are not achievements. But businesses that are doing these well-informed educational content creation strategies, they're not just making impressions, they're making an impact. And that's the point. You want to make an impact on your audience, because if you do, then your audience will remember you when the time is right.

Speaker 2:

A lot of people forget this. Instead of trying to go so hard and outbound and oh, by the way, I'll mention it again just calculate your costs, your expenses of what it costs to have that very expensive outbound sales strategy. The people you're paying those people. Even if they're batting, they're not batting. Even if they're goose egg not putting up deals, you're still paying them for that effort, right? So one thing I always like to try to help businesses understand is all of that effort right, needs to lead to something, and if you're not getting results from that, then you need to think oh well, maybe an educational content creation strategy would help us reduce our burden on that type of sales strategy and make content that educates our burden on that type of sales strategy and make content that educates our audience so that, instead of having to go hardcore outbound to them when the time's right, they come inbound to us.

Speaker 2:

And I don't think it's very difficult to ask every single person that would be consuming this to think about the time that you remembered something from a company that made, yes, an impression on you, but they made an impact that you didn't forget. And it might have been days, weeks, months or years later when you're like, oh, I'm going to do that and I'll give you an example. There were purchases made on the truck that I drive right now that, when I decided to put certain wheels and certain tires and certain lift kit on my Toyota Tundra, I didn't forget the impact that certain companies and brands made on me. That made me very interested and it made me do a lot of research and I spent a lot of time and they would have been able to track my time on site and all these other metrics that we follow, but I never converted, I never made a phone call and never filled out a form, but I had all the information because they had put things out there that made an impact on me. It educated me. It took my level of knowledge to a place where I'm like they're going to get my first shot.

Speaker 2:

And then, when I had the truck and the budget, I pulled the trigger on those brands. Why? Because they did exactly that. Their content creation strategy was based on educating and helping and informing me, so no one was beaten down my door to buy their stuff. They helped me, understand them and made them a player and a first choice for me. That's what your businesses needs to be doing is make it easy so that when the time is right and the problem happens inside the dealership, the pain point gets so terrible that they remember that content, or all of the content that you constantly put out there to be helpful to them, because if you don't do it right, then they'll never know. Somebody has to, and yeah, so and it's. I just want to say this especially I'm sure it's like this in a lot of industries. In the automotive industry, almost every segment of the automotive industry is just begging for they're so ripe for somebody to be the thought leader, to just own the category, and if you need help with that, well, I can help.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's perfect for my next question, since hired guns marketing philosophy is very forward thinking, taking B2B marketing into the future. Before we wrap this up, take another few minutes and share some additional insights about hired guns, because not everybody knows about hired guns yet, since we are fairly new. You're not fairly new in the auto industry, maybe all these people that are going to be listening first to your podcast, but just give us a few more insights about just Hired Guns and their philosophy, their foundation.

Speaker 2:

I'm just kidding, no, I'm definitely not new, that is for sure. I've been around the block a few times, but hopefully not overstayed. My welcome To your question the hired guns. The foundation is kind of grounded in three primary areas. One of them is, I mentioned, know your buyers. Your buyers have more access, unprecedented access, I would say, to information and we, all of us, have had that. So just consider that your buy, whoever your target buyer, your audience, all these different ways of you know defined your, your customer, like who buys from you, they have more access to information than they've ever had. So just help them buy right. Help them buy things.

Speaker 2:

You need to stop, as I mentioned, don't crash parties you weren't invited to. When you're forcing yourself on uninterested people, you are not helping your brand, you're not helping your cause, you're certainly not selling more stuff. Just help your customer, your ideal customer, help them navigate this purchase or buyer journey independent of you. Number two, I would say that all of you businesses out there need to realize that the expectations that people have, your target customers have, are very influenced. Like heavily influenced expectations Means. Your consumer landscape has really been reshaped over the last many years, especially on the business to consumer side or direct consumer marketing models. That expectation on that side it's instant gratification, world right. It's like people have the expectation that everything's seamless, nothing breaks, it's all personalized for me, make it super easy. I mean, we have these younger generations. Sorry if you're one of them, but you're probably way over entitled and shouldn't be, and somebody should have told you a long time it's not really the way the world works. And so we have, unfortunately, people even in businesses that grow up and they realize oh, you know why isn't my crybaby thing working? It's because you forgot the fact that the expectations of your customers are massively influenced. And when you realize that, it will make you do things differently. So that's the second piece that's really kind of foundational for us is make sure you know that your expectations of your consumers are very, very influenced, and that very much has happened now on the B2B transactions as well.

Speaker 2:

And then the final piece that I tell people all the time is word of mouth, and specifically digital word of mouth. I think a lot of people forget about that in the old school days before digital. So all you young whippersnappers I don't even know what the age is right now of the cutoff of. If you didn't grow up with the Internet but certainly you and I grew up without the Internet and I would say back then people would really appreciate the value of word of mouth. Somebody says something great about your business. They were a pleasure to do business with, they were kind, they were nice, they tried to get us in and out as quickly as possible. Whatever it is, if you do the right things, to be kind to people, respectful of people, make them love you. Most people don't want to earn that type of loyalty, but when you do that and especially now in the digital era, it's dominated by online reviews, recommendations from your friends, your peers in business, traditional sales tactics like the cold call, which all salespeople pretty much uniformly hate these days Well, of course, that's all going to be met with a lot of skepticism and a lot of resistance.

Speaker 2:

But when you think about what happens from a word of mouth digitally I mentioned this before and it really a lot of it gets categorized into dark social. If you're not doing this right now, this will help you get an idea of if any digital word of mouth is happening. If not, your content creation strategy is going to help this, by the way. But if you're not getting much digital word of mouth, you'll know when you start to look at the comments on things that you post. If you're not posting anything, then expect nothing. But if you are posting there and then you get nothing, I'm not talking about somebody liked your post. It's the easiest thing in the world to get somebody to click that thumbs up button, but to get somebody to jump in there and say something that adds to the conversation or it's helpful, that's really great and one of the ways that you can capture that. That isn't really easy to identify in standard attribution models like Google Analytics or something like it is.

Speaker 2:

When you put on any of the contact forms, when people come inbound to you and they fill them out, you need to ask it, because I see a lot of forms where there's a bazillion required fields and there's not a single one that has a dropdown that says how did you hear about our company? And when you ask the question, how do you hear about our company? And sure you could have a few radio buttons Google, I saw you at a trade show or whatever. But if there's a oh, we heard about you through some some, or there is a even better yet, like an other or comment section.

Speaker 2:

When you start to deploy and be successful with a content creation strategy, you'll find out that the digital word of mouth payoff is when people actually, in that part of your form, say I heard about you from so-and-so, ceo of so-and-so, and they can't stop saying all these great things about you because of all the great things you're doing. They love doing business with you. That's happening out there in the world and it's happening more as this starts to evolve, but not nearly enough companies are taking advantage of it. So those are kind of the three areas I'd say. You've got to know your buyers, you have to understand that the expectations of them have changed and they're heavily influenced, and you have to understand the value of word of mouth from a digital perspective.

Speaker 1:

Well, we're to our last question. We're going to close this first episode out. This is great so much information but I want you to end the episode with giving a final piece of advice, something you'd like to leave for a company looking to overhaul its marketing strategy when should they start and what should they focus on to make a real difference?

Speaker 2:

I'm trying to be short with this answer and it's repetitive, but I'll be concise here to close it out. Where should they start? Know your audience Truly. Know your audience. Who is your customer? And if you haven't done this exercise in a long time, then maybe it's time to do it. Because if you don't, or you've never done it, or you don't trust, or maybe it's somebody from your marketing team that did it, or maybe might be your sales organization Hopefully not, but because your marketing team really needs to know who the customer is. If you've not done this in a long time, or whoever's running marketing wasn't the person who did it originally, I highly recommend starting with making sure that you know your audience. What are their problems.

Speaker 2:

How do you help? So that's huge. Know your audience and then start making content for them, specifically for them, and focus on subject matter expertise content, not the fluffy stuff of hey everybody, happy Independence Day. Not that there's anything wrong with those messages. If you want to do that, that's fine, but that isn't going to get a single person to buy from you just because you said Merry Christmas on one of your posts on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and wherever else you put your stuff. You got to focus on the subject matter expertise content. The hint, I would say, is lots of video on LinkedIn, lots of video on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2:

But you need a consistent, dependable, affordable content creation strategy that'll help you grow your revenue, your recognition and, let's not forget, brand. And why is that? Because most of the companies that are interested in getting this far into content have a lot of competition. And why is it important to grow your brand? Because most of the time, when you have a lot of competition, the best brand wins, and that means the most helpful, the most visible, the most interesting, the most accessible. That brand, when you have a lot of competition, is the one that wins. So why not make it yourself? Or why not make it your company? You know?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the perfect place to stop here and for all of our listeners. We hope you found the information valuable and would love to hear from you If you've watched the episode on YouTube. Please like and subscribe to our channel and check us out on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram For more information about B2B marketing or to reach Sean, visit hiredgunsagencycom, where we turn your expertise into marketing firepower. Thanks, so much See you later.