Accelerating Sales Success with Account-Based Marketing ft. Pam Didner

Mark Richardson:
How’s it going? Welcome to another hang in the Data Basement. This is The Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Mark.

Pam Didner:
Hi mark. This is Pam.

Mark Richardson:
Hey Pam. Welcome. Yeah, we’re here with Pam Didner, who is B2B social media marketing consultant, and thought leader extraordinaire, keynote speaker, author, B2B professional. We’re very excited to have you here today on The Data-Driven Marketer.

Pam Didner:
I’m very happy to be here.

Mark Richardson:
Listen, I think I’ll kick to you to let you introduce yourself. My experience has been much more on the B2C side, so if you could tell me a little bit about yourself and some of the things you’re excited about today.

Pam Didner:
Yeah, Mark, it’s great that you actually have a B2C experience. Unfortunately, I’m 100% on the B2B side. And for listeners, you cannot see how I dress. I wear a black V-neck cashmere. I dress very, very boring, and a lot of people think like, “Oh yeah, that’s how a B2B marketer is. And everything I know is usually on the B2B side and is basically how to sell to businesses. And I’ve never really had any kind of B2C experience. So, Mark, I’d love to hear your perspective in trends from marketing, like the consumer marketing side of things. And I was at Intel for 20-some years. I left Intel and I wrote a book about global content marketing. And the book is really about how to scale content across different regions within enterprises. And from that point on, I have been an independent consultant, and I have a little boutique agency that has been sending out my own feed.

Mark Richardson:
Fantastic, that’s very exciting. When you take on an account, or when you’re given a referral, or you have… Doing prospecting or looking at a potential account to take on, what are some of the first things that you look for as part of that onboarding or audit?

Pam Didner:
it’s very interesting. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, there are several things I dial up and then indicated or showcase as my forte, and they are sales and marketing alignment, counter-marketing account-based marketing, and another thing is sales enablement. And it is really all about how to align the sales and marketing. And when any kind of prospects reach out to me, they usually have a question in terms of, “Hey, we are supporting sales. We’ve been doing this and this and this, and the salespeople are not happy. So, what else can we do?” And that’s usually how the conversation got started. And sometimes I have clients that come to me and basically said, “Hey, we’re doing a lot of domain gen to businesses, but we are not getting a lot of results. Can you look at some of our campaigns that we were running and give us some feedback?” And there’s another situation is like, “Hey, we are writing a marketing plan for 2022. Well, you know what, we got our budget slashed, and we must redo our plan. So, what can we do to make that happen?”

Mark Richardson:
Sure. Yeah.

Pam Didner:
And to answer your question, it really depends on what kind of questions they have, and also what kind of challenges they encounter. Depending on the solutions, then I customize my recommendation and my discussion with them. So, it’s not necessarily that I actually only do one thing, but now the B2B marketing side of things, I was very fortunate to actually do a multiple kinds of marketing, from supporting sales down to even marketing, down to social media, down to content marketing. So it depends on what the client’s issues are, and I tend to have a conversation with them based on that.

Mark Richardson:
And do you focus primarily, I think more on the media strategy, flighting type of side, or if you notice if there’s a gap in the MarTech or AdTech stack, is that something that you’re looking at as well, or you’re focused.

Pam Didner:

I do.

Mark Richardson:
You do.

Pam Didner:
Yeah. So, in general, I look at internal and external. So, I will look at it internally in terms of how sales and marketing collaboration are. So that’s a process in terms of collaboration and communication. And if I look at external, let’s assume is domain generation, it depends on what kind of domain generation effort they do. And is it a pure email marketing campaign, or do they have a paid media effort associated with it? So we’ll look at the different channels and determine how they can optimize them. So, there is some paying media effort, but it really depends on what the issues they encounter. Does that make sense?

Mark Richardson:
Got it. Yes, it does. Yeah, so it’s really on a case-by-case basis.

Pam Didner:
Yes.

Mark Richardson:
One account might have just a rock-solid social program, but they’re trying to make it work for them down the funnel in search, for example, and that’s where you come in and kind of fill that gap.

Pam Didner:
Exactly. I have a client come to me and say, they’ve been doing LinkedIn pay media campaigns, and it’s running well. But they really want to dial up the conversion rate. And then we start talking about the terms of their email sequence, and what they need to change. And, in terms of the copywriting and subject lines, what needs to be done to actually test it, to see how we can increase that conversion rate. So yes, you are totally right Mark, it’s very much a case-by-case basis, and that’s what makes my job interesting.

Mark Richardson:
That is super interesting. It’s like the Spider-Man meme when you see he’s pointing at himself. Hearing these strategies, it sounds very familiar with things that I’ve espoused. It’s interesting because, with ABM, you’re reaching a buying committee, right? We talk about this idea of theirs the main decider, then there are the influencing deciders, and then there are team members, the people who are actually operating the tool itself, who may not be the ones who are actually signing the check; probably not, right?

Pam Didner:
Yeah.

Mark Richardson:
So how do we reach… I must put my B2C hat on and think, I might need different messaging to reach each of those different cohorts, right? This could be somebody in their mid-60s who’s signing the check. But the person who’s going to be using the SaaS tool could be in their late 20s, could be three or four years into their marketing career. And they’re the one who’re going to be really getting their hands dirty with a keyword research tool, or whatever it may… An audience tool like NetWise, or ZoomInfo, or whatever the case may be.

Mark Richardson:
So I’ve found that in thinking about under the larger umbrella of ABM, we almost have to think human-to-human. And I’m stealing a phrase from a past podcast guest, Brian Kramer there with his… His philosophy is, it’s not B2B, it’s not B2C, it’s H2H, and it’s human-to-human. And I think that philosophy is something that we’ve kind of adopted and has helped improve our targeting because it’s not just… You can’t just think about the CEO, you can’t just think about the VP of marketing, right? And I heard a great conversation you had with Steve Kearns from LinkedIn.

Pam Didner:
You did? Oh, that’s so sweet.

Mark Richardson:
I did, yeah. Oh, it was so fun. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it was a-

Pam Didner:
Am I loud? I’m so loud… at a podcast; it’s insane. Everybody was like, “Tone it down Pam. Tone it down.”

Mark Richardson:
No, it was great. You have such amazing energy. It was a really good conversation. You talked about gen Z.

Pam Didner:
Yeah.

Mark Richardson:
And it’s like, why are we marketing to them now? Why are we worried about…? They’re not signing the checks, right. They’re not the decision-maker per se, but they will be. So, one of the challenges we have is how to balance setting a long-term strategy, using marketing as a sustainable evergreen suite of tools and platforms and strategies to cultivate not only awareness but affinity over decades. Not just, “Are we going to close this deal by the end of Q1?” Whereas a lot of times sales, they want, “Okay, we got this lead in Q4. That needs to be closed Q1.” Do you know what I mean?

Pam Didner:
Yeah, I hear that. I hear you.

Mark Richardson:
So maybe you could speak to that, how you negotiate or evangelize the need for long-term growth, but also keep the balance for short-term success, yeah.

Pam Didner:
Well, it is a great question. Actually, you hit the core, and that’s also the fundamental difference between sales and marketing. And I always talk about there are fundamental differences between the two groups. For example, marketing tends to focus on the top of the funnel, and sales are about closing, closing, closing, right? And then, the marketing tends to focus on the long term. That’s building brand awareness and brand affinity. And the sales focus on the short term.

Pam Didner:
You also brought up another point earlier that the marketing people, they tend to focus on, say the end customers, and we use the word “buyer personas”. But when you talk to salespeople, they are talking about accounts. [inaudible 00:09:37] Intel, HP, they talk about accounts. But when we talk about our marketing effort, we really talk about the end customers or the buyer’s persona that we go after. So from the get-go, there are differences between sales and marketing. And because there are fundamental differences, you, I have to be honest, it’s very hard to be 100% aligned. You can.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, I completely agree.

Pam Didner:
The key thing is, can you find a two-circle, and then you find the overlapping part of it, and then make that overlapping part of it bigger over a period of time, because the two-circle can never 100% merge, but somehow you can make them closer and a closer, right?

Mark Richardson:
Right.

Pam Didner:
And the best way to actually do that is to find some sort of joint initiatives to work together. And the one very ideal way to do that, just like you indicated earlier, is ABM, which is account-based marketing. It’s very much account-centric type of effort. But then, you have a marketing effort to compliment that. That makes sense?

Mark Richardson:
It does, yeah.

Pam Didner:
So ABM is one way that you can somehow… Trying to find a balance between the short term and long term, is one joint initiative that you can work together.

Mark Richardson:
I love that.

Pam Didner:
That’s one way. I’m saying there are many, many way you can align sales and marketing, but that’s one option. The other thing is that you can kind of balance that long term and short term, is the sales always are… They’re out in a hunt, right?

Mark Richardson:
Right.

Pam Didner:
And you hear them talking about hunters versus farmers, which is the sales people who are hunters, they are out to hunt for new logos or new accounts, and they are farmers basically trying to maintain a relationship with existing account.

Mark Richardson:
I love that. I think Adam actually used that. Yeah, he used a plow in one of our marketing decks. Yeah, reaping the harvest, exactly. Sorry, go on.

Pam Didner:
Exactly. Right hunters versus farmers. So one way to actually try to align the long term goal is try to understand what are some of the new accounts we are going to hunt. And a lot of time on the B2B side, the purchasing cycle tend to be long. And if I wanted CocaCola to be my account, we’re starting today, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it tomorrow. That doesn’t mean you’re going to get it by the end of this quarter. It’s going to be kind of like, you know that’s in the horizon, but it’s going to take a while to get there, right?

Mark Richardson:
Right.

Pam Didner:
So another way to align, say the marketing’s long term type of effort with say sales, a short term type of effort, is find out in the long term, what are some of the awesome ideal accounts that the sales people would like to reach. Find out what they are, and then see if we can actually help them. Does that make sense?

Mark Richardson:
It does, yeah.

Pam Didner:
That’s another way to align in terms of the dilemma of the short term versus long term.

Mark Richardson:
I love that answer. I think that is… That’s incredibly detailed and concise at the same time, which is awesome.

Pam Didner:
Oh, thank you!

Mark Richardson:
One thing I wanted to kind of drill into, and this is not to… We can NDA any specific clients, but let’s just say, we have ABM intelligence software that’ll tell us, “Hey, this account is taking key activities in assessing your landing pages and your money pages on your website.” And so, we always have the conversation. It’s like how targeted do we get? Do you go with an ad that says, hey company X. We’ve got the tool for you. Are we at the point where we can basically say, we know, you know we’re tracking you, and you know we know that this tracking thing is happening. So let’s just…

Pam Didner:
Let’s just talk.

Mark Richardson:
Cut the crap, let’s talk. Yeah, exactly. You know you want us for our tracking, for our data. Let’s shorten this window, because we’re all tracking everybody, yeah.

Pam Didner:
Yeah. So the one thing-

Mark Richardson:
What’s the right level of creepiness, or thirstiness in that ABM [inaudible 00:13:50]?

Pam Didner:
That’s actually a very good point. So I would like to address that a little bit. First of all, everything we do in the digital world is trackable. Even you go to the dark net, somehow is trackable, somehow. If people really want to track you down, they can track you down. Especially we are not in the dark net, dark internet, in the current internet, everything we do, Big Brother is watching. Everybody is aware of that, right?

Pam Didner:
And somehow, to acknowledge or not to acknowledge, we somehow just have to have understanding that we’re being tracked. That’s number one. And I think, as myself, I know that I’ve been tracked by Google. Okay. Even I have Google Home, I have Alexa, I am sure they are listening. But at the same time, I kind of want… A convenience, and ask Google and ask Alexa, in terms of, “Oh, what is the price gold today? What is the price for the Google? Where’s the nearest restaurant of taco,” right? I want the sense of convenience, so I have that kind of device set up, but I’ve been tracked.

Mark Richardson:
I mean that’s the trade off, right?

Pam Didner:
That’s a trade-off we pay.

Mark Richardson:
In exchange for the convenience, we give you the data.

Pam Didner:
Exactly.

Mark Richardson:
We give you the knowledge of, I’m in the market for this. Now, here we go.

Pam Didner:
Yes. In general, I think everybody has a solid understanding on that. Especially you talk to business professional, they get that. I’m not talking about consumers; they are very emotional about that kind of thing. I’m talking about business professionals, they kind of know that, okay? Now the thing is how to reach out to them, because they know we are tracking them, but how to reach out to them so they don’t feel like, “Oh my God, you are just creepy. I just type in Istanbul, Turkey, and now I get the ads in terms of Istanbul Turkey, and the tour guide,” or whatever, right?

Mark Richardson:
Yes, yeah.

Pam Didner:
The holy grail is actually in the detail. So if you know somebody is actually looking for something, how you reach out to that person, you need to think about it. For example, I’ve been tracked. Yesterday I bought… I switched my SEO tool from one platform to another, okay?

Mark Richardson:
Okay.

Pam Didner:
Somehow somebody just know I bought a new SEO platform, and today I got five emails and agencies coming to me and said, “Hey, I can help you on SEO,” no joke.

Mark Richardson:
Wow, wow. That’s-

Pam Didner:
Right? But the way that they talk about it, I immediately know they were tracking me, it turned me off. I deleted the email without even reading it.

Mark Richardson:
So that’s the… That’s the invasive level right there.

Pam Didner:
Yeah, exactly.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah.

Pam Didner:
It’s like right away, I bought something yesterday, this person is like, “You know what, I know you bought it. Let me tell you I can help you.”

Mark Richardson:
Let me tell you why my tool is better.

Pam Didner:
But however, there were a time I would get emails I such as, “Hey, just wanted to let you know I read your article about this and that. You mentioned about SEO and I agree with you to some extent, but there are certain things I feel that you are missing it. Therefore, for your SEO team need to do better, there are the following things you need to do. Do it yourself, knock yourself out. But if you need help, reach out.” So they are selling to me and I know that, but they did some homework.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, they did some homework and they approached it-

Pam Didner:
They know I’m missing something.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah.

Pam Didner:
I’m like okay, maybe I should talk to this person. All of a sudden, it piques my interest. So you can track people, and you can have all the information about what the person is doing. But how you reach out is very critical, and that you cannot standardize it. That’s another thing. My biggest takeaway from doing stuff on my own and also working with my clients right now, in the past, I would say about couple years ago, I would say standardized, standardized, standardized. You know what I’m saying? Scale, scale, scale.

Mark Richardson:
Yes.

Pam Didner:
But the more I used in a business-

Mark Richardson:
Template, template, yeah.

Pam Didner:
Template, template, template. But the more I enter this business of tracking and try to understand what other people need, the more I feel it actually humbles me. The more I feel that you need to customize it and you need to do your homework before you actually reach out. But that’s a lot of work .

Mark Richardson:
It is.

Pam Didner:
But if you want to reach out to 100 accounts, you cannot do that. I get it. But for key strategic accounts, or the business you want to reach, you have to do it in a very personalized type of manner.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, you have to do the legwork. Yeah, I love that point. I think that’s… Waiting a few days before acting up.

Pam Didner:
Exactly, exactly. I was like, you could wait a few days!

Mark Richardson:
It might be the first… the first piece of advice.

Pam Didner:
You don’t really have to reach out to me, okay?

Mark Richardson:
Now I’m curious, and feel free to decline, but can you share which tool you switched from and which one you’re using now?

Pam Didner:
Yeah. I don’t mind.

Mark Richardson:
In the SEO. Yeah. I’m-

Pam Didner:
Yeah. I actually switched from Ahref. Is it called Ahref-

Mark Richardson:
Ahrefs.

Pam Didner:
I think so. [inaudible 00:19:16]

Mark Richardson:
Ahrefs, yeah.

Pam Didner:
Ahref. And for a long time, I call it Ah-ref. Everybody was like, “What is Ah-ref? Seriously, Pam.” Okay, Ahref.

Mark Richardson:
I don’t think anyone knows what the right answer is. We’ve all been calling it Ah-ref, yeah.

Pam Didner:
No, I say Ah-ref and everybody was like, “What?” Anyway. And I switched from that to Semrush.

Mark Richardson:
Nice. Okay. I was-

Pam Didner:
Honestly, both are very good. But yeah, some stuff I would like to do more within one platform. That’s why I made that switch.

Mark Richardson:
Ahrefs, I think it’s great for the backlink side, but for your keyword research, content marketing, I totally agree. I think Semrush is more the suite.

Pam Didner:
You’ve got a very good point, Mark. And you talk about MarTech stack, and this is one thing… Is a great time to actually talk about this, if that’s okay with you.

Mark Richardson:
Oh, absolutely.

Pam Didner:
The reason I make a switch, in addition to the features I’m looking for, is also the process flow, right? I want to do some sort of content marketing. I want to actually check the blog post I write, I want to be able to look at specifically in terms of hey, what is availability? What is SEO? What is the tone? And I don’t think Ahref can actually do that, and I can copy and paste into that platform to actually see that very quickly. And then, Semrush actually have a content marketing type of writing platform that built into it. So when I’m looking at my own workflow, I was looking at how my MarTech stack looks like for content marketing. And because my process flow changed, then I changed my MarTech stack to accommodate that. Does that make sense?

Mark Richardson:
It does.

Pam Didner:
Yeah, so the MarTech part of it is super critical. As a digital marketer, you have to understand your process, your workflow, and how tools are used. If your process are changing, chances are you also have to evaluate your platform to make sure that there’s features that can accommodate the changes that you are going to make.

Mark Richardson:
I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s one thing we’re working on building out a team here so I can train people on the pieces of Semrush, that it’s like, there’s times… That platform is so robust, there’s times when I just-

Pam Didner:
So, too.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah. I just want to be in there. I want to train 20 people on… here’s how we can leverage this thing and do… Yeah, exactly, really ramp up our content efforts, which we’re getting there. It’s an exciting time here.

Pam Didner:
Yeah. I hear you. The only thing I was very hesitant for a long time is Semrush is a whole lot more expensive than Ahref.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah.

Pam Didner:
And I was hesitant because it’s just super expensive. Finally I was like, “You know what, I’m just going to buckle down and I’m just going to buy it. I’m going to use it and it’s going to be great.”

Mark Richardson:
And has it been awesome?

Pam Didner:
I only did that change, I would say 48 hours ago.

Mark Richardson:
Oh, wow. Okay.

Pam Didner:
I’ve been playing with it in the past two days. So far, just like you say, it’s very robust and it’s very intuitive. I’m looking forward to using it more.

Mark Richardson:
Awesome. I think you’ll really enjoy it. Yeah, that’s one of my favorites.

Pam Didner:
Your favorite tool?

Mark Richardson:
Oh yeah. It’s one of the top arrows in my quiver.

Pam Didner:
Awesome. So what other tool is in your quiver?

Mark Richardson:
So one thing I wanted to kind of talk about is a hot topic nowadays, is CDP. One thing we’re working on is segment. That’s something I’ve… Recommendations to any enterprise are to get your data organized. So, when we talk about the MarTech and now the RevTech stack is really about structuring your data and making sure that you have clean and consistent data passing through. And so segment has been… that’s the one that I’m very heavily reliant on, and have enjoyed setting up. Now, they just got acquired by Twilio.

Pam Didner:
Twilio is cool. I use Twilio too, for texting stuff. Yeah. So if you want to set up a sequence for getting a text and getting a notification, Twilio is wonderful.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, we got to get on that, I’ve got to say.

Pam Didner:
It takes a lot of time and also testing. The key thing about MarTech stack is you must make sure… in addition to the customer data needs to flow from one system to another, you also hit the core. The biggest issue that every company encounter is the quality of the customer data. And I can tell you, everybody struggles with that. Nobody actually has clean data. It’s very hard because there is a natural data decay, [inaudible 00:24:21]. So it’s very hard to keep up. And if you want to make sure your data is clean, you really have to scrub the data, and you have to spend a lot of time. The problem is with the many marketing departments, they want to allocate the money to actually do campaigns, and they want to do hiring. But if you actually want to spend the money to do data cleaning, that kind of benefit, you don’t see right away.

Mark Richardson:
Exactly, yeah.

Pam Didner:
And therefore, many, many executives are talking about short term versus long term. And they don’t necessarily want to spend the money to actually focus on the data management part of it. And I think slowly one by one, people started to understanding that how important the quality of data is. You can see more and more companies are willing to put a budget to clean the data, and to actually spend time to make sure that the data can move freely from one system to another. But we are not there yet. Many enterprises, even including a very savvy startup, we are all behind in terms of the quality of data.

Mark Richardson:
And this is something that as a data provider, we have a part of our process is ensuring regular sweeps and accuracy checks. So yeah, I think one of the tough things, especially doing B2B, is the fact that everyone is changing. You’ve got people changing jobs, changing employers, changing titles. So the contact information, you might have had a good conversation going with someone at… Nike even then. And then the next time you try to talk to them, they’re over at Adidas. And then someone new might be on that account. So you’re working this Nike account, and the person you’re working is no longer there. So I think that’s certainly one of the solutions or one of the use cases that we’re trying to solve with our platform. And not that this is an advertisement, but it’s just a challenge. It’s something we’d constantly be working on and devoting bandwidth and manpower to.

Mark Richardson:
And like you said, companies want to be strategic about budget, and they will all say, well, maybe we don’t want to spend the money on the data side, but you really need to. Especially now with the deprecation of cookies, there’s the first-party and third-party data leveraging has become so important. And so much of what marketers want and sales leaders want to try to utilize, because it’s this addressability concern. Is this data accurate? Am I reaching this person in the way [inaudible 00:27:04].

Pam Didner:
So do you do a lot of data enrichment as well? Not just your data, that you also pull the third-party data to validate and then combine the data together?

Mark Richardson:
Yes. Yeah. So our platform pulls. Yeah, we have both B2B company records and the contacts at those businesses. But also have the ability to match those with hashed emails. Yeah, so that’s our core product offering, and it draws from an identity graph, which is I’m getting at the outer limits of my understanding of the tech, but it will have some really cool campaigns rolling out talking about that. And we just got purchased by Dun & Bradstreet. So we’re in a bit of a trans-

Pam Didner:
Oh, awesome! Congratulations!

Mark Richardson:
Yeah. Thank you.

Pam Didner:
I was going to mention about Dun & Bradstreet. But I was like, maybe these are competitors; I should not say anything.

Mark Richardson:
They were. To be fully candid, I came on board three, four months before the acquisition occurred. So yeah, it’s a really exciting time, but it was fun to be pulling all our oars in this direction as a startup. We’re the small, scrappy startup, and then to be recognized and brought into the larger D & B ecosystem, which is obviously one of the giants in the B2B space. So it’s really exciting.

Pam Didner:
Excellent. Congratulations.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah. And here’s some boiler plate. We’ve got Jess has dropped some of the actual… The specific language-

Pam Didner:
Yeah, unless you drop it as Adam. I was like, “Is Adam here?” Very good.

Mark Richardson:
I produced the Jess cosplaying as Adam today. Yeah. So yeah, consumer data specifically, so it’s all opt-in data. And for third-party sharing and marketing targeting. So all compliant to run on your social and search customer match platform. So yeah, again, but this not an advertisement. This is a conversation. So yeah, you had asked me about some other tools. There’s a really great tool that kind of went away.

Pam Didner:
Which one?

Mark Richardson:
A company called a company called Gnome. Do you ever work with… It was very simple. It was very simple SEO service and this might… it might be that they just… They wanted to kind of get out of the Greyhat space, because it was very much owned web 2.0 profiles. You just pick a package, they would create 250 or 500… Just personal profiles across the web on different-

Pam Didner:
Oh, wow.

Mark Richardson:
Web 2.0s that you could then fill out and just populate with whatever content, whatever links. And typically, my strategy was to point these to blog content or video content, and just build out really beefy kind of cosplay profiles that is like imitating a fan, but getting that link traction going. And it was such a-

Pam Didner:
Really? Is that more targeted for the backlink?

Mark Richardson:
Yeah. It’s a more Greyhat. It’s a little bit of a Greyhat backlink strategy, which speaking openly about this, hopefully Google doesn’t take away all my privileges.

Pam Didner:
I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I mean, the backlink is so tricky, and I can totally understand that company, or if you are looking for quick fix, or try to build more links that people will trail that a little bit on the black… [inaudible 00:30:41]. We know the backlink is so much work. And at this point, I usually just rely… if somebody want to link my stuff, great. If they don’t, forget it. In the past, I will work hard and try to get a backlink. It’s too much work. I finally just decided whoever wants to link, great. And if they are not going to do it, fine. And then I feel much better. I’m like, “Okay, I’m not doing that. All right.”

Mark Richardson:
It is kind of a nice thing. It was such a piece tool in the toolbox for such a long time was having this process flow of, all right, we have this PR. We’ve got to reach out to the webmaster. It’s like you rely on something for so long, you don’t bother to question whether that process is still serving you. So like having the PR SEO process is something I’ve just always evangelized, because it was extant in 2009, 2010, when I was really learning this space and kind of cutting my teeth on content and how to promote it, and learning how Google’s algorithm functions. And it functioned a lot differently, you know bef-

Pam Didner:
More now than ever.

Mark Richardson:
Before Penguin and Panda came along, everything… So it’s interesting to be here now in this B2B space, applying things, lessons and successes, failures, et cetera. That’s the only way you can really work, is by iterating off of what has and hasn’t worked before. But in the SEO space, when Google tells us, “All right guys, now we can see, all right, sites that have this type of backlink structure are losing their traffic.” Then we all go, “Okay, time to back off that strategy,” right?

Pam Didner:
Yeah.

Mark Richardson:
So this is one that the organic side, it always just feels right. It feels right to go out and ask webmasters, “Hey, we have this content we think it would be useful to the link.” Right. But yeah, is that process really… is it really useful for brands now? Probably not.

Pam Didner:
No, it’s a lot of work, and the conversion rate is very low. I don’t do a lot of backlink myself, so I cannot speak to it honestly. And I’m more just counting, hey, let’s make sure my… I’m QA optimized. I make sure I write a content that’s relevant to my audience. And if people want to actually backlink my content, great. If they don’t, I’m okay with it. So once I kind of pass that, and then just do the content from the perspective I’m serving somebody. So I’m sharing my knowledge, I’m sharing my content, and I’m sharing the templates. “Hey guys, this is how I would do it. If you want to use it, knock yourself out,” and if somebody want to link it, great. And so yeah, the first several years when I was doing SEO, and I was really working hard and trying to get a backlink, sometimes you have to beg, or you have to do a swap. But now [inaudible 00:33:42] whatever, it’s okay.

Mark Richardson:
Or they’ll charge you some exorbitant rate.

Pam Didner:
Oh yeah, exactly. And I’m just like, “Forget it. I’m not doing it.” Yeah. I know. It’s kind of like not the right things to say. And whenever I talk to SEO people and they were like, “What! You are not doing backlink? No!”

Mark Richardson:
I think that’s what everyone is… that’s what they’re supposed to do, right?

Pam Didner:
[inaudible 00:34:09]

Mark Richardson:
They’re supposed to have that reaction, because I’m at the point… And Google’s seen enough of my work that they know…

Pam Didner:
Yeah. And the backlink impact the domain authority. And I was like, I’m okay with my domain authority score, it’s fine. I’m not going to sleep over it. The most important thing is, doing the backlink or not doing the backlink, I’m still doing pretty well business-wise. So that means there are certain things I derive on SEO, that I’m just not really want to focus on, I don’t know, the backlink stuff. It’s just too much work. So in the past seven years, the business continue to grow, and the people still find me organically, because I don’t do a lot of pay. I don’t even do pay. I try, and the pay only works well when you have sizable budget and you do it in a sustainable manner. Pay advertising is great, but you need a budget. You need to do it constantly. If you don’t have budget, don’t do pay. That’s why I told my clients, have a budget, otherwise, don’t do pay.

Mark Richardson:
Because it needs to be constant. It needs to be-

Pam Didner:
It needs to be constant. You have to do it at least 12 to 18 months. There’s no shortcut. On the pay side, there’s no shortcut. And I told many, many small businesses.

Mark Richardson:
I mean, we’re running up on our time, but I wanted to end with the topic of your new ebook, which is AI, which is, as we look forward to what’s next in marketing, what’s next in the RevTech space. And I think talking about paid budgets is a good segue, because so many… Google’s max clicks and conversions engines, the Facebook…

Pam Didner:
algorithm.

Mark Richardson:
Is an algorithm, it’s all AI-driven.

Pam Didner:
Yeah, it’s all being driven by algorithms. Is all AI driven, yeah.

Mark Richardson:
Twitter, I think Twitter, YouTube, TikTok is all being infused with more AI programming by the day. So I think it’s interesting to look at the budgeting and media flighting and planning conversation in conversation with the needs, because certain businesses, you might want to play… If you want to play on Facebook, do you have 20 K a month? No, then okay, then you’re not going to get the benefit of running it, right?

Pam Didner:
Well, I’m not going to get a benefit. Absolutely not. I 100% agree with you. And that’s one thing that people don’t want to talk about, and I’m frustrated with it, is people don’t want to talk about budget openly. Frankly, if you want to do pay media, you need to talk about budget. And sometimes small businesses don’t understand that, because the media agencies that they work with may not want to tell them that you need a bigger budget to run it. And which is a shame, because I was looking to doing a podcast advertising for one client of mine. So when I was talking to my client, my client say, “Maybe we should run initially $30,000.” I was like, “You know what? I don’t think that’s enough.” And then…

Mark Richardson:
And they were going, “what!”

Pam Didner:
Then save this. So I go interview the podcast advertising agency. Many of them told me you need a minimum of $300,000 for six months. And that makes a lot of sense to me. And I get that. The media agencies get that too. But to convince my client to think that way, that is a stage and a journey that you have to go through. Eventually they will come around.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, it’s reducing that sticker…

Pam Didner:
Yeah.

Mark Richardson:
The sticker shock side of it, right?

Pam Didner:
Yeah, and they’re like, “$300,000? I don’t think so. Let me talk to you about this a little bit more.”

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, it really is, whether it’s the AI, to achieve that critical mass through the AI-powered algorithms on Facebook or YouTube, versus going in through a trust based channel, like influencers on Instagram, or podcast hosts, which are obviously booming, the creator marketing as a tool in the content toolbox obviously is taking a much bigger percentage I think, of enterprise budgets, certainly that I’ve seen over the last five years. It’s really cool to see how that… you can’t leave social media behind, but it’s almost like people are moving into more trust based impressions than sheer volume, I guess.

Pam Didner:
Yeah. And also more targeted. I guess… once you know your demographics, or even the specific segment, or the bias persona you want to reach, I guess like a Facebook app platform, or maybe app platform will allow you to actually provide a lot of requirements, and determine what is the specific segment you want to go after. And if you can narrow that down and well, I think pay can actually… You can reap the benefit of the pay advertising big time.

Mark Richardson:
Cool. I think that is a great place for us to put a bow on this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today. Can you let our audience know where they can find you, follow you, subscribe to your updates, buy your books, all that stuff?

Pam Didner:
Yeah. So go to my website, pamdidner.com. My last name is D, as in David, I-D, as in David, N, as in Nancy, E-R, pamdidner.com. Or you can Google search me, and it does come up. Almost every single channel except TikTok. The reason is, I haven’t gotten my dance down, you know? I’m working on it. I’m working on it. I want to bring the ’90s dance back. No, I’m kidding.

Mark Richardson:
Yes.

Pam Didner:
You can also find me in the multiple different social media channels, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. And if you have any questions about B2B marketing, or sales and marketing alignment, reach out anytime. Love to answer your questions.

Mark Richardson:
Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Once again, this has been The Data-Driven Marketer. I’ve been Mark.

Pam Didner:
All right. Very good. Thanks a lot, Mark.

Mark Richardson:
All right. Thank you, Pam. Have a great day.

Pam Didner:
Thanks a lot. Take care.