Break Free of Boring B2B with Influencer Content Ft. Lee Odden

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Notes

Welcome to another episode of The Data-Driven Marketer. Meet Lee Odden, the CEO and Co-Founder of TopRank Marketing, a specialized digital marketing agency serving enterprise organizations with integrated content and influencer marketing solutions. Lee is a digital marketing strategist, international speaker, CEO, and the author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing (Wiley). He also leads agency strategy, industry evangelism, and serves as coach and cheerleader for an amazing team of marketers. Let’s jump into the conversation highlights, including content, search, and influencer marketing solutions for B2B technology brands.

  • TopRank marketing is a 21-yearl old B2B agency based in Minneapolis. The firm’s response to the pandemic opened their labor market to staff in nine states. 
  • TopRank started as a PR firm; Lee showed how PR can attract journalists and prospects to enter the business with SEO. Today, TopRank grows influence for B2B brands with influencers and content.
  • Empathize with people on how to do their job using search. People are pulling themselves to information online; either you’re there or not as a brand. It’s not just buyers; it’s people everywhere.
  • Better content means helping people find the best answer.
  • Improve your B2B content by bringing in outside industry experts to build trust with your audience.
  • Matching buyer personas to your funnel is oversimplifying content marketing; however, this exercise helps you understand what needs you must meet with your content.
  • Start here: search queries are an indication of demand. 
  • Let’s use the keyword research to find the people who are most trusted on this topic. Then, create content with these influencers to build trust.
  • The relevance of the audience is the most important factor when working with influencers in B2B, not the relevance of the influencer. 
  • Reach, relevance, and resonance are the fundamentals of influence.
  • Digital transformation led companies to succeed with new digital strategies: digitizing the buyer’s journey. How do we create experiences to transcend the online and offline environments?
  • TopRank has a mandate to elevate B2B marketing. To compete, their agency must come together in a meaningful way. They invest in each other (relationships) through social gatherings mixed with learning opportunities.
  • “Break free of boring B2B.” Use unexpected methods to draw people in.

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Transcripts

Lee Odden:

It’s not just about providing the information that’s findable, but so okay, let’s use that keyword research to find the people that are most influential and trusted about those topics. Let’s partner with them to make this content together and now we can give information to people that’s easy for them to find. And it’s using the language of the customer and we found that it tends to be more accepted, it tends to be more engaged with and it tends to be more acted upon as a result.

 

Mark Richardson:

Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Data Driven Marketer. I’m Mark.

 

Lee Odden:

I’m Lee.

 

Mark Richardson:

Welcome back for another Hang In The Data Basement. We are here with Lee Odden of Top Rank B2B marketing. It’s going Lee?

 

Lee Odden:

It’s going great. Good to see you, Mark. I love that data, hanging in the database.

 

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, we are hanging.

 

Lee Odden:

The basement. Yeah.

 

Mark Richardson:

We’re in the data basement. We call it the weird intersection of tech creativity and data. And we’re thrilled to have you here today because you guys have been doing some awesome stuff. So, before we jump into some of the stuff we’re fired up to talk about on the Influence Front, give us a quick rundown of what brought you to this point. How you started Top Rank B2B Marketing?

 

Lee Odden:

Well, we’re a 21-year-old agency, so we’ve been around a little while. We’re a mid-sized agency based in Minneapolis. Although we have staff, we have team members in nine different states. COVID has really opened the labor market for us to the whole United States, which is exciting. Started as a PR firm. I brought SEO, [inaudible 00:01:43] optimization as engine optimization into the PR firm and said, “Hey, if we optimize press releases and executive bios and stuff, we could show the rest of the company how PR is creating value for the business by attracting journalists and even prospects to come into the website now was an innovative thing at the time and been involved in creating content and social media, search marketing.” And in the last eight or nine years our emphasis has been on influence, growing influence for B2B brands. A lot of technology companies like LinkedIn, just figured out we’ve been helping LinkedIn for nine years with content and SEO and Dell, SAP, so on and so forth. So that’s kind of the place where we play B2B tech, marketing, creating great experiences for our customer’s customers.

Mark Richardson:

Love that. I love and it’s sounds like a journey of adaptation as the marketing space has evolved that the needs that people are coming to you, I’m sure, have evolved. So you’ve had to kind of stay light on your feet. So one thing you mentioned is that you were innovating at first by helping evangelize SEO as part of your PR strategy. How have some of those best practices, how are you changing those or continuing to apply the same principles in this new, sort of influence focused environment?

 

Lee Odden:

So you think about, search is a place that people are, they’re having a problem, they’re looking for answers, they’re looking for solutions, they’re doing research or they’re pulling themselves to information and either you’re there or you’re not. And it’s not just buyers, it’s people looking for jobs, it’s people that are trying to get customer support, even people in the media. So the genesis of that intersection of SEO and PR wasn’t empathizing with the fact that 7,000 journalists had lost their jobs during that the. com bust area and what of time to start a business went over 7 trillion in revenue or was lost and then nine 11 happened and all the crazy stuff, so they’re using technology.

 

Lee Odden:

So empathizing with how your audience uses things like Search to do their job and how we can help our client or even ourselves be the best answer. So the thing that is persisted is this idea of understanding how people use search as a tool to solve problems, to collect information, to source resources and that sort of thing. And how you can do things with marketing and content to make yourself that best answer, right?

 

Mark Richardson:

Right.

 

Lee Odden:

And so that’s not only being findable but it’s also being incredible and that’s where Influence comes into play. We can use Search all day long to have high rankings, but if no one believes what they find when they click on that blue link, that doesn’t mean anything, right?

 

Mark Richardson:

Right. Yeah.

 

Lee Odden:

So, increasingly we’ve found, okay, there’s social proof you can have in there like as seen in this publication and this testimonial or whatever, but we found that by bringing in outside experts, especially in B2B content where we’re talking about longer sales cycles and a lot more information being consumed before decisions are made, that it really warmed up the market. It achieved things like shortened sales cycles, it achieved things like greater order volume, and it created more trust and drove a lot more conversations around what was important to the customer. And by believing what was being published by the brand in concert and collaboration with industry experts, we achieved a lot of goals without having to break the bank.

 

Mark Richardson:

That’s awesome. I think Search, it kind of gets a bad rap, especially because people are try to figure out, “Well, do I have to pay for it in order to be good at it?” And it’s like, “No, you don’t, but you could. You can pay for it and juice traffic to your site.” But ultimately the proof in the pudding that you want is are people coming back to that content? Are they sharing it with their networks? One thing I’m interested to click into with you is establishing trust amongst different roles, different positions that are in that buying committee. As B2B marketers spoke to the challenge of long sales cycles, what can we do? Are there pieces of content that we digital marketers or event marketers or content marketers in general, can use to shorten that sales cycle to answer questions? Do you do a persona based approach? Here’s content for the data scientist at an account, here’s the content for the CEO, the CMO. Do you guys think in a segmented way like that?

 

Lee Odden:

We do and we do focus on building out, so for borrowing from the world of ABM, the idea of ideal customer profile and what is the firmographic information relative to that business and then the information relative to who’s part of that potential buying cycle or I’m sorry, buying committee, and architecting content to help satisfy their needs. Now I can oversimplify and say top, middle, bottom, funnel, right? And the way we approach that is, “Okay, what are the key questions that that customer needs to answers. So the executive who’s sponsoring their team to go out and find a vendor, find a solution for a problem that they’ve got, right? Well, what do they need to know? People who are actually tasked with conducting the research and evaluating vendors and that sort of, what do they need to know? What can we do? What can we put out that will make their job easier? And then creating content to meet those needs. That’s straightforward to say execution obviously, is a little bit different, because there’s suffering information overload and attention deficit.

 

Mark Richardson:

Totally. The need to say too, there’s almost a bit of guess work. There’s a trial and error and a kind of a focus group quality that I’ve noticed in actually determining, “Hey, the need of person X on the buying committee may be a slightly different need than… The CMO might want to increase ROI and save 20,000 dollars a year on a SAS tool than they’re tasking the specialists.” Or the director to go, “Hey, find me a tool that does this great thing but also save us some money.” So I find you have a shared vision but sometimes also competing priorities even within that buying committee. Does that make sense?

 

Lee Odden:

It does. It does. And sometimes you can pull yourself down a rabbit hole of trying to get so super specific in meeting the needs of those individual actors, I suppose. And so maybe we think of it more as zone versus man to man. And what we’re looking at is warming [inaudible 00:08:32].

 

Mark Richardson:

[inaudible 00:08:32] sports analogies.

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah. Trying to warm the market, right? Because we know that obviously we’re not going to be able to satisfy every individual at the level at which they want to be satisfied. But what we can do from a content distribution standpoint, a relationship building standpoint, from a conversation driving standpoint in the industry, is to have a authority to have the credibility that we can satisfy most of those needs, most of that criteria that they’re looking for. And that’s why this idea of being the best answer works so well. Now obviously you can get into some specifics, especially when you do keyword research and using that keyword research not only for content optimization for better ranking on Google, but also to inspire content creation that might be published not on Google because obviously search queries are an indication of demand. This is the broad topic people are interested in. This is the syntax of the questions people are literally typing in.

 

Lee Odden:

I love the fact that tools like Semrush have question research tools, like what questions people are actually typing in or story based or even there’re other tools that offer that kind of data and then you can architect your content accordingly to literally answer those questions. But again, it’s not just about providing the information that’s findable. So okay, let’s use that keyword research to find the people that are most influential and trusted about those topics. Let’s partner with them to make this content together and now we can give information to people that’s easy for them to find and it’s using the language of the customer and we found that it tends to be more accepted, it tends to be more engaged with and it tends to be more acted upon as a result.

 

Mark Richardson:

I love that. I think we may have stumbled on a potential title for the episode, The Language Of The Customer. I think I love that. I love that phrase because I think that is ultimately the place where brands and I think influencers become successful is when they feel like they’re part of your team or they’re part of your tribe or your network or I think about the value that we’re trying to drive here, providing actionable strategies to marketers on the data driven market or listening to certain political podcasts or marketing podcast that I rely on to keep me informed, to give me that sort of extra level of intelligence. I kind of nerd out on a lot of legal stuff. So Supreme Court podcasts, a lot of the DOJ type stuff. And when I’m in my consumer mode, I also have this marketing hat on in the back.

 

Mark Richardson:

It’s never just pleasure. Even when I’m trying to consume something that I think is just cool and I’m just trying to relax, you can never really turn off that little marketing gremlin in the back of your brain going, “Hey, what’s the marketing behind this? What was the campaign strategy behind this and how are they monetizing it? They have a substack and a Patreon.” You know what I mean? So it’s just like I could never just enjoy the content as much as I want to because I’m just curious about the machine, the acquisition and retention machine that’s going on

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah, we’re drinking our own Kool-Aid so to speak, or we’ve seen the sausage being made so our experience is it’s tough to actually put our shoes in the shoes of a customer and yet if you are in the business like you are, marketing to marketers, then maybe you are a good fit for that. One thing I was going to say about influence is influence in B2B is very different from consumer. And so folks listening might be thinking of what we’re talking about in the context of those consumers on consumer influencers on Instagram and other TikTok or whatever. And it’s the course of B2B, it’s not like that at all. You actually have to have expertise. You’re an analyst, you’re a scholar, you are a business leader, or whatever. And in a lot of cases they’re not paid. It’s that they’re advancing their own cause, they monetize through consulting, they monetize through speaking engagements, they monetize through other business models. And so they’re willingness to partner with a brand to co-create content is a win. There’s a value exchange that’s happening there. There’s some real authenticity. Is that a double? [inaudible 00:13:04]

 

Mark Richardson:

It’s a double positive, right?

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah, there we go.

 

Mark Richardson:

Real authenticity.

 

Lee Odden:

And that’s big part of criteria of who you select is, do their values align? Do they bring something to the table that’s actually meaningful to your audience? That research report that I talked about, when B2B brands are looking for influencers, the number one criteria was 98% said the relevance of the audience itself was absolutely the most important thing. So I thought that was very interesting. It wasn’t the relevance of the influencer, it wasn’t how many fans, friends or followers the influencer had, in fact that was way on the bottom, it was actually the relevance of their audience, which of course makes sense because they’re trying to influence an audience, exhibit, or behavior.

 

Mark Richardson:

Sometimes you can’t just go with, “Okay, he’s got the most followers, he’s got the most downloads, ratings or reviews. If it’s not the trust component or the authority and expertise component that you’re really looking for, then that’s not the place to be. Whereas someone with maybe 25% of those metrics, maybe a better ecosystem or a better alignment just because what you said, the values, I think that’s huge for our listeners. I think really going and finding partners or finding content ecosystems that align with what you said, the values and the experience that your customers are having or the verbiage that your customers are using in relation to their needs states.

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah, and certainly data plays a role. The fundamentals are reach, relevance, and resonance and values. I mean the software platforms that are out there to help crawl the vast amounts of social data that’s used in order to rank people in terms of how influential are they on a particular topic, do use those fundamental data points. But then ultimately you’ve got to validate, you’ve got to actually take a look at the content they’re producing and understand what their drivers are, what are their motivators.

 

Lee Odden:

Increasingly in B2B there are pro influencers where you pay them and there’s a time and a place for organic in relationships, for organic collaborations, and there’s a time and a place for paid. Absolutely. And it’s funny, about five years ago, I’d say 80% of our engagements with B2B influencers was organic unpaid. Whereas today, it’s about 50, 50. 50% of organic, 50% are paid because there are more people who have, they’ve created business models for themselves. They are experts but they’re also really good at creating media and they’ve created audiences and they’ve created publishing platforms like a podcast or like a video series or a multitude of different distribution channels. So a brand can actually buy into that. And so the way that’s represented is yes, this is sponsored, this is a sponsored thing, but the content’s so good, nobody cares, right?

 

Mark Richardson:

Right. Right.

 

Lee Odden:

Whereas in another instances, if it’s an organic collaboration, it’s really more, “Hey, I’m on the ground.” And, “Hey let’s unbox a server together and take four hours to plug wires in and do this and that.” And it’s just sort of a more relatable, practical experience.

 

Mark Richardson:

Definitely. When I think organic content, I don’t know why my mind goes to Twitch streamers, but I’m always like, “Where is there an ABM? There’s got to be an ABM play in the connecting these other, we’ve partially by virtue of COVID, I think there’s the nature of B2B has changed a little bit and there’s this eagerness to bring the in-person component back in.

 

Mark Richardson:

One thing we talked about, we’ve mentioned this a really cool VR execution so we can try to steer towards the events rabbit hole, which I think is sort of an interesting place because it’s, old school sales was very much in person chat, handshake, drink a beer or have a cocktail, let’s make a deal. And now I think there’s, in trying to gain efficiency, trying to gain effectiveness as a brand, it’s like we’ve pulled back a lot. I think also due to economic factors is just causing a lot of brands to do. it’s doing more through Zoom and I find that, I’m not a salesman, but I find that you don’t quite have the same relationship over a Zoom call or over a phone call, over FaceTime, or teams that you do face to face with someone.

 

Mark Richardson:

And that same kind of dynamic occurs in a boardroom or in a creative brainstorm with your creative team. So marketers having to juggle and do this hybrid thing now, it’s like where we’re isolated, a lot of us working in our own, head down in our own apartment or home office and then regrouping together in this virtual sense. So we’re having our virtual meetings and then on top of that is we’re also going back into events. Great things like Pubcon, Moscon, Dreamforce, which is coming up. We’re going to be a Dreamforce if anyone’s going to be there. So it’s an interesting new reality that we live in. And I’m wondering =have you guys at top rank really had to pivot or change aspects of your pre COVID acquisition and ABM strategy?

 

Lee Odden:

We certainly didn’t. There’s plenty of research, even in our own research we found that go to market models changed substantially in our own research around influencer marketing, specifically 71% of B2B marketers we surveyed said they changed their go to market, obviously to be more digital, focused on digital. Because obviously because of COVID, you know had field sales, gone, real world events, gone. And so these experiential of real world interactions with sales or for sales with customers is just not available. So what is also interesting is that companies that did pivot to digital, sort of the digital transformation that was forced upon companies because of COVID also affected marketing in terms of marketing, digital transformation. And so what I found is interesting is that a lot of those companies found that what they moved to digitally was just as effective or more than what doing pre COVID.

 

Lee Odden:

So it’s stuck and so, of course, we’ve kept up with that, right?

 

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

 

Lee Odden:

And amazingly I feel so fortunate, and of course I’m going to say my team is amazing, but they really are. I mean we in 2020 we had a better year than 2019, which is crazy because so many companies were shutting down their budgets. But we pivoted and we pivoted to really focusing on the digital side of things. And in 2021 we beat 2020 by October, which is crazy because COVID was still full in force. And so there’s a lot of momentum around digital and how to make the most out of that experience because people on the B2B buyer side are now digital first and they’re pulling themselves through the vast majority of that sort of buying journey digitally by identifying, finding, sourcing information through digital means. And as real world events come back online, it is an interesting sort of how do we deal with this? And how do we create experiences that transcend the online to offline, back to online sort of situation?

 

Lee Odden:

And I believe, and what we’ve been putting into effect, is the notion of creating relationships. And even internally, we had our first all hands ever a couple of weeks ago or I think it was last week, and where we brought in team members from nine different states and we had a little summit for our agency and two thirds of those people had never even met before. And we’re finding that I’ve got content marketing world and marketing cross B2B forum. Two events coming up here in September and October. And I know that people that were used to interacting, interfacing, and even sourcing vendors in person for years weren’t able to do that for a couple years. And they’re super hungry to go back to tasting that real world experience. But as a marketer, we have to be prepared not only to create the experience in person that we’re used to creating in the past, but also be able to keep the love alive, keep that magic alive afterwards via digital channels. And that really is, it is a challenge, but it’s there and I think it’s fueled through relationships.

 

Mark Richardson:

I love that. I think relationships ultimately are the best form to create influence or the best… If you think about the ways that I’m influenced personally or that we’re influenced on a personal level, it’s because it kind of goes back to things we were talking about before, it’s someone you trust, someone had experiences with, and I think you bringing people in that have never met in person, I think that’s just such a fan of the in person collaboration because then like you said, you can take that back. You can have a better understanding of who this person really is. What their values are, as we mentioned. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How do we compliment each other as a team?

 

Mark Richardson:

Sometimes it’s easy to feel like you’re in a silo especially with hybrid. I’m sure some of your team probably feels the same, it gets in a way it’s like, “Lee, I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over and over again. I wasn’t really getting anywhere.” And when you bring everybody together, you could really see that, kind of feel how far we’ve come because of the interactions and conversations that can happen in success or learning sharing that can go on. It gives you a great foundation to then launch future projects with that kind of trust and shared understanding.

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah, and I think you hit it on the head, the trust. It’s like, “Is this person that I don’t work with on a daily basis, can I trust them to be a good partner on the event that we do start to work together? Or do I trust the fact that they are working in a totally different department, yet both of us are responsible for advancing the company in our respective ways. Can I trust that there is enthused and invested as I am?” That in person experience helps confirm that, right? Or create some confidence in that. And that’s powerful. Those shared experiences, in person experiences, especially if the organization responsible for putting it together, architects, those shared experiences in the right way, that’s a forced multiplier for your organization. It really is. And I think that translates to marketing and how you deal with events and how you can activate your team, activate prospects, activate your customers. Content collaboration, for example, is one great way to do that, whether it’s in person or digitally.

 

Mark Richardson:

Can you give some examples and just from team building or collaboration exercises you did? I think our audience would find that really interesting.

 

Lee Odden:

Like interning. The first thing is we opened things up with a happy hour. So we opened it up, not with a formal interaction, but it was like the night before everything started so everyone could meet in a very casual environment that disarms folks and mail makes everyone more available because it’s a social setting. I think it was a really great way to open things up. And then during the event we had information that was relevant to everyone, but then we quickly broke out into departments and we had department level interactions where everyone sourced their own goals, identified their own goals for the next quarter, that sort of thing. We had team brainstorming and then we had social activities and we took everyone to Top Golf and hit some balls and we did what we call a Pontoon meeting. So [inaudible 00:24:51]

 

Mark Richardson:

How does-

 

Lee Odden:

How does the Pontoon meeting-

 

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, tease that one out for us. Yeah, what’s the Pontoon meeting?

 

Lee Odden:

So, Top Rank used to be right on the shore of Lake Minnetonka and we’d have these fun getaways where we’d rent one or two big pontoon boats, 30 foot pontoon boats, and have everyone go on there and just tool around the lake and have a meeting, I’m putting in air quotes here, and end up over at a restaurant and have some food and drinks or whatever and then come back. And it was just a great way to have this experience. Now with folks flying in from San Diego and Portland and New York or Florida or wherever, people flying in from all over the country. And a lot of them had never been to Minnesota before, had never done anything like that before. And so it was a really cool way to connect.

 

Lee Odden:

So that’s what I mean. It’s a combination of, okay, here’s a shared experience from a work perspective where everyone is included and gets to contribute or has the opportunity to contribute to something meaningful, not only to their department, but to the company at large. And then some social interactions that kind of, let’s talk after the meeting kind of stuff. And that’s what I found to be really powerful.

 

Mark Richardson:

So then I think in those post scrum conversations, then, it helps reinforce that no matter where you are, I think that that’s the biggest thing is no matter where your base or what your role is, today, more than ever, I think marketers need to feel like they matter, their contributions matter. It’s levels of impact, I guess.

 

Mark Richardson:

The digital director or the specialist may not affect the bottom line ROI with the single ad campaign. I mean that’s crazy to assume that one ad campaign could, but sometimes you may put that pressure. Your ad manager, campaign manager may feel that the pressure to save the sinking ship or help the ship move faster. And I think having those types of in person communications and one on ones will help people feel a little bit better incrementally, as we’re in this together, you don’t have to do it all yourself. Because with hybrid, I don’t know, maybe I’m alone in this, but I feel like there’s an intense pressure when you’re alone doing a project that you don’t necessarily feel when you’re in a bullpen or you’re in an office with a team. Does that make sense? Is that just…

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah.

 

Mark Richardson:

So I think, all that to say is, this offsite sounds like a great way to invigorate good discussions amongst-

 

Lee Odden:

Exactly.

 

Mark Richardson:

Amongst the team.

 

Lee Odden:

Exactly

 

Mark Richardson:

And accountability.

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah. And it is. So the magic is in the follow up. So we do a survey afterwards asking everybody, what did you like least? What did you best? What were your expectations? Were they met? What are recommendations for improvement? That sort of thing. We’re always trying to source feedback from our team when we have all hands. And usually, of course, they’re digital. And also there are commitments that the teams made during that meeting that we’re following up on. We had an outside speaker, we had Sally Hogshead. You’ve got to look her up. Sally Hogshead is amazing professional speaker. We have a sort of inside track to her and she came, she happened to be doing a presentation for a big company Minneapolis, and came over and spent 45 minutes with us. And that was amazing to have this big nationally known, internationally known keynote speaker, come to our tiny little marketing summit and share her insights about better communication and personality styles and that sort of thing.

 

Lee Odden:

So there’s follow up in that regard, too. So we have this mandate, if you will, to elevate B2B marketing. And we’re a mid-size agency, so there’s only so much we can do. But there are points of focus that we have. And we know that in order for us to compete, because we do compete against much larger, larger organizations, is that we’ve really got to come together in a meaningful way. And we believe that our clients appreciate that. We believe that they also are invested in the idea of elevating the practice of B2B marketing. So we want to show them that we’re investing in ourselves, we’re investing in each other and by proxy, that’s investing in our clients, investing in the success of their marketing programs too. And a big part of, again, the fuel that makes that magic happen are the relationships. Relationships between our own team members, but the relationships between our team members and the clients and even the influencers that we partner with.

 

Mark Richardson:

Awesome. I want to transition, we’re going to kind of land the plane here, we’re getting close to the end, but you had mentioned a really cool execution and a phrase I wanted to jump back to. Ways to take B2B, take the boring to boring out of B2B. So you had mentioned a brand embracing VR at an event and how effective that was. Not to go too deep, but this was a really cool way of doing an event. So, if you could speak to that before we close here.

 

Lee Odden:

So we’ve embraced this idea of break free of boring B2B. And I actually gave a presentation at a conference where that was the topic. And I actually had, one of my creative guys created this, I don’t know, 500 foot tall grizzly bear with lasers coming out of his eyes. And we had this animated asset, and with a cat driving a little car, and it’s shark, and it was just kind of crazy stuff. And there’s a lot of other examples of that too, where we had a financial services technology company that used an artificial voice assistant called Penny to navigate audio content and through a audio oriented ebook. And another one was this virtual reality experience. So how can we create an experience that people have never had before? Let’s see if we can leverage virtual reality. So we recorded expertise and insights from industry influencers around a particular group of topics and we created a 360 degree virtual world.

 

Lee Odden:

And then you spawn in the world and you could walk down these pathways. At the end of the pathways as a recorded video where you could watch of an influencer talking about their point of view. And we thought it would be effective online, but it was just too data intensive. So what happened is that Trade Show Booth, the brand had people experiencing this content with the goggles and showing video on big screens and what the participants were seeing. And that is what attracted so much attention. It’s like, “Oh, what are these people of goggles doing? What are they seeing? What are they experiencing? Can I try?” And that was a really effective way to leverage. That was unexpected to use virtual reality and influencers, whoever thought of that coming together to be effective.

 

Mark Richardson:

I think that’s awesome because it brings in both the enchantment side, this big wall. So you’ve got people, you’ve attracted interest with a big video wall, and then people seeing somebody doing something, they’re like, “Okay, it’s not only just a billboard, it’s like somebody’s in this experience.” And then you’ve got that aspect of how do I play? I want to get in there. And that’s ultimately, when the eyes light up and you lean in and you’re like, that’s what you want out of any interaction, whether it’s B2B or B2C, you want that enthusiasm for the experience. And that’s hard to quantify. We call ourselves data driven, but that enchantment is still kind of an in ineffable conversion.

 

Lee Odden:

Yeah. Well, and what we do today, we’re not continuing to create those virtual experiences, but we’re doing is creating the experience and that sense of participation is collaboration. So not only do we invite industry influencers to collaborate on content, but we invite customers and even prospective customers to contribute their expertise and to create content assets that tend to be experiential, that everyone feels like, “Wow, I look good in this.” And the cumulative value of all those different points of view along a singular topic really becomes a resource that’s valuable to people in the industry. And so those who invest their time in contributing and collaborating feel like they’re invested in making it successful, right?

 

Mark Richardson:

Right.

 

Lee Odden:

So they feel like they had a hand in making the marketing that’s actually being used to market to them.

 

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. And there’s more shareability, amplification. There’s enthusiasm around that, like you said, because they had a hand in creation of it in the process. So there’s a sense of pride, I think-

 

Lee Odden:

Exactly.

 

Mark Richardson:

…That goes along with it. So thanks everybody for listening. Thanks to Lee Odden of Top Rank B2B Marketing Agency. And so Lee, where can people find you out on the inter webs?

 

Lee Odden:

Well, I would definitely encourage folks to reach us on our website, toprankmarketing.com. We’ve got a blog there that’s been around since 2003. So literally written, I figured out, 1.4 million words on that blog about all aspects of B2B content marketing, search and social and influence, so definitely check us out there. Or of course on the social web, whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter or even Instagram, my favorite personal social channel, it’s Lee Odden, L E E O D D E N.

 

Mark Richardson:

Amazing. And you can find us datadriven.news. So we thank you everybody. Please listen, share, subscribe. Thanks for listening it to the Data Driven Marketer. I’m Mark.

 

Lee Odden:

I’m Lee.

 

Mark Richardson:

Thanks so much for listening.

 

Mark Richardson:

Thanks for listening to the Data Driven Marketer. Our show is produced by Jessica Jacobson and Dan Salcius. This episode was edited by Steve Kosh. The data driven marketer is sponsored by NetWise, a Dun and Brad Street company. Any views or opinions expressed in this episode do not represent the views or opinions of NetWise or Dun and Brad Street.

 

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