What If Your Audience Chose Your Content?

‌Ben's Calendar30Time zone: Mountain Time - US & Canada ChangeThursday, Sep. 18  9:00 am10:30 am2:00 pm3:30 pmFriday, Sep. 19  5:00 pmMonday, Sep. 22  10:00 am1:30 pm3:00 pm4:00 pmSee all available times‌Benjamin Ard (00:01.998) And then give me one second. Okay, there we go. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Justin. Justin, welcome to the show. Justin Cruz (00:15.048) Benjamin. Glad to be here. Benjamin Ard (00:18.188) Yeah, Justin, I'm excited. This is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. It's going to be so fun. But before we dive into that, let's get to know you. Tell us about yourself, history, and your background. Justin Cruz (00:30.124) Yes, sir. Yeah. So my name is Justin Cruz. I'm the director of digital marketing at TSIA. We're a technology service research company, subscription based. And I've been working there for over two and a half years. I have almost 10 years of digital marketing experience, just building and scaling the man gen systems from everything from small business enterprises up until the enterprise level. So have a strong background in paid advertising and website development and working on those types of projects to drive and scale demand for B2B companies primarily. So yeah, it's just a little bit about me. Benjamin Ard (01:17.27) I love that. And before we got on the podcast, you mentioned you were using back in the day, Dreamweaver and anyone who's been using Dreamweaver like myself who used that, you know, they've been in the space for a while. There's a lot of people nowadays don't know what that is, but it's always fun to hear that reference because that was something I loved and I did a ton of back in the day. So I love it. So, so Justin, what we're going to talk about today is how to build a B2B demand engine. That's both personal Justin Cruz (01:39.161) yeah. Benjamin Ard (01:47.502) and scalable. Now what's interesting is those often feel like counterintuitive terms that they're mutually exclusive. You can't have one without the other. Is that true? And what are your thoughts in general about scalability and personalization at the same time? Justin Cruz (02:05.761) Yeah, that's a great question. And before we even get down into the weeds of it all, just think, like, thinking about the words in themselves, personalization, like, it can mean so many things in marketing. One of the things that I've been seeing a lot is McKinsey talking about, expect, I think 71 % of consumers expect personalized interactions, but only And then there's like 76 % of them get frustrated when they don't happen. And I think consumers have a perspective on what personalization is and then marketers have a perspective. If you hear the word personalization and you think, you know, first name token on an email, that's not really what I'm talking about here. You know, I really think about personalization as from the person perspective. So something that's relevant and timely. And When I talk about scalable, another thing to define, because I've had marketers ask me many times, what do you mean by scalable? And what I just mean is something that is compounding over time, something that is, you know, able to build upon, not something that's overly complex or convoluted. So I really just want to define those key terms, you know, because B2B personalized demand system. These are all good buzzwords in marketing, but they can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Benjamin Ard (03:38.496) I love that. That makes perfect sense. So let's look at the demand engine specifically. We're building a system. Demand is to help scale and grow and do all that fun stuff for our business. How do you make that personal? You talked about the first name token and that's not personalization really. I sure, it's probably not a bad idea sometimes to use something like that, but what do you mean by personal and how do you actually build that into your demand generation? Justin Cruz (04:06.206) Yeah, no, it's a good question. Ultimately, it starts the demand engine, I think of it like a system, you know, and systems are so powerful. When we think about marketing and strategy, especially from a B2B perspective, when we talk about who our audience is, a lot of marketers know who their personas are. But in the B2B world, a lot of In my experience, a lot of leaders don't really understand who their ideal customers really are. And when we talk about personalization, we mentioned two key words, relevant and timely. you know, in a lot of B2B companies, I think there's like a fallacy that our system is so powerful, especially with AI, that it can be relevant to almost anybody. And I've heard this It's like there's lot of cliches that you think we would be passed by now. But the more you get into these conversations, you realize like to make it personal is like you really have to understand who your customers are now. know, like who they were last year may not be who they are this year. So when I think about strategically creating a demand system that's personalized, I really have to say, OK, who are the customers who are the people at these companies that need what I'm selling right now. And that really is like the lens that we create our demand system from. Benjamin Ard (05:45.528) I love that. That's super cool. So with that personality and trying to understand your ICP, all of that kind of fun stuff on the flip side of the coin, how do you take the personal stuff and scale it? How does that actually work? Justin Cruz (06:03.634) Yeah, no, that's a good question. So when we talk about the man gen, it's a living breathing system. So we have to build a system. And I think that's where it starts, right? Like to be able to create something that's scalable, as I mentioned, it has to be repeatable. has to be able to compound over time. And so we have to kind of take a really high level perspective on what we're actually trying to achieve here. Benjamin Ard (06:32.622) Hmm. Justin Cruz (06:32.828) One of the things that separates the man gen and I've seen this argument a lot, you know, these last probably five years, you know, coming from a paid advertising role, a lot of the focus and emphasis on marketing, a lot, it can get really narrow and, know, we might really want to just focus on leads, high quality leads or. in the new world of product growth, they might want to just focus on awareness and just, you know, just really drive interest in what we're doing because the product will kind of carry the load. And one of the problems that I see that a lot of leaders, you know, and founders might not really understand is for one, there's only about 5 % of your total addressable market that is really ready to buy from you at any given time. And that's the reason why you might say, we have a million dollar budget. Like, why, you know, aren't we seeing millions of leads, you know? And it's like, there's a competitive market out there. And, you know, if you really think about it, there's only like 80 % of your market, you know, there's some statistics out there that say 80 % of your in-market buyers won't even consider you unless they've heard about you, you know, before they start that journey. So in order to make this scalable, and personal, we really have to start at the top with what, who are we selling to and what are they interested in right now? And how can we position ourselves, you know, to be that solution for them or what is our, you know, like value prop right now? Because one of the things that I think I've seen, especially I think exacerbated with AI copy is just the amount of generic messaging. Everyone has the AI tool that's gonna solve all your problems. Everyone wants to be the all-in-one solution. And those types of messages are not personal and they're not scalable, like they're broad. And that's where I try to narrow the focus. Benjamin Ard (08:25.44) you Justin Cruz (08:48.005) When my conversations with leaders and founders is just understanding, have your billion dollar TAM or billion person TAM, but you really have maybe a very, very, very small percentage of those prospects who are really interested in buying from you. And if they're ready to buy, they better already kind of know who you are. you just kind of like building the foundation for why a system that thinks from this point of view is so important before we can really like understand how to build that personalized scalable model. So I really just start with looking at the data. You know, the power of AI now is just like helping you synthesize that data into, you know, a clearer vision of who your customers are. And that's what I've done, you know, in the last several years, just working with, with TSIA is just looking at Okay, who was actually bought from us in the last couple of years? Because really we sell 10 different memberships, you know, but there's probably some, some, some clear winners, some clear outliers, some clear companies and personas that really need us and who we can really speak to, you know, in this coming time, you know, and I think that that's been pretty game changing in helping us say, marketing has a limited budget. We can only support so many of our business opportunities. So we don't want to play favorites. We have to look at the data and say, you know, in order for us to really create impact as an organization, we really have to understand who our ideal customers are. And then, you know, from a strategy perspective, we can say, These are our core segments, our personas within those segments, and the messages that are going to resonate. then putting together our content engine is like, it's just kind of like, you know, kind of build itself from there. Benjamin Ard (11:01.312) I love that. Okay, that's super cool. There's a lot to unpack there. Obviously the whole purpose of this podcast is to talk about content, how we amplify content. And I love the groundwork we've laid here on demand generation. If it's personal, how does it scale what that actually means versus, you know, just putting in first name and all that kind of fun stuff. So when you look at this demand, Jen engine, That is also personal, but scalable. How does content play a role in that whole process? Justin Cruz (11:36.72) Yeah, I mean, think content is more important now than ever. You know, we've been working to build out our content strategy for a while. For some companies, having a lot of content is a challenge right now. At least that's been the challenge before AI. I think most companies now don't have as much of that challenge. Especially here at TSA, we have so much amazing content from our research. but I think where it falls into the system is understanding that there are stages. And this has kind of been the framework I've used to understand where content really powers a strong personalized funnel. Once you have all of your definitions defined, once you know who your ideal customers are, your personas, then you start mapping content to the stages of awareness. So if you've heard of the five stages of awareness, this is a framework that we've been using here at TSA for the last couple of years. And it's been really instrumental in helping us understand what type of content is going to take a customer from completely unaware to fully aware of who you are, what your product value is, you know, and how, why, you know, they should essentially take action. So. That's essentially the framework that's helped us define where does a ebook or state of report kind of fit within our framework and what other assets and content types do we need to accelerate that demand journey? And once you start with, when you start with a clear ICP, it becomes really powerful because then it's, you we don't need 20 different ebooks. need maybe two or three types of content that we can personalize for different segments, or we can maybe focus on different contexts depending on who we're speaking to. But we know this is a really strong piece of content and we can repeat that framework across different segments. And if we map it to these stages of awareness, we're making sure that we're following a prospect Justin Cruz (14:03.576) No matter where they land in the journey, if they engage with a piece of content, we have a strong sense that they care about a specific problem. We know, you know, their role, their title. We understand kind of what they're looking for. And, you know, we can kind of start to educate them further, you know, based on where they're at in that stage. Benjamin Ard (14:26.476) That's so cool. Okay. As promised, Justin, these episodes go by super duper quick. are almost out of time. One final question though, any thing or advice for anyone looking at their demand generation and saying, I need to make it more personal. I need to scale it and I'm just not quite certain where to start. Any final pieces of advice for anyone kind of finding themselves in those shoes? Justin Cruz (15:00.504) Yes, sir. you know, one of the things that I've done to make this a lot simpler and easier to understand is kind of put all of my, all of my ideas into a framework that I think has just made it a lot easier to follow all these steps because we've kind of just scratched the surface, you know, and ultimately I think the biggest piece of advice is to have a strategy. So whether it's my focus framework, which is something I've created and I'd be happy to give a free template to your listeners. But have a strategy, have a plan, understand that DemandGen is a living breathing system. It's either evolving or it's eroding and your customers are expecting personalized experiences. So you need to kind of have a plan, audit your strategy, audit your tools, because you need powerful tools to really execute this across the journey. and that's where we've seen some really tremendous growth with tools like Webflow optimize. You know, we use AI powered personalization to be able to show relevant messaging to prospects when they come from an ad or an email. Like we, really have to create that synergy across the buyer's journey across our different tool sets. So you really need a strong framework to do that and execute that across the entire journey. So I would just say. start with any type of audit of your current strategy because if you aren't sure what's broken or what's working, I can guarantee you there's probably some holes in your system. It's just one of those things, even the best systems, they're fragile, you know, so these things need attention, just like anything in your business. And it's probably one of the most vital systems, you know, that a marketing team can have. So focus on the key areas where you know you can execute. You know, it's like you kind of have to focus on, you know, one step at a time, I would say, you know, to kind of make it short. For us, we had to rebuild our whole system from the ground up. So I would say start at the top, you know, and make sure that you're getting some good interest and reach. you know, fill the gaps where you can. You don't need a perfect system. Justin Cruz (17:24.895) You know, make sure you got something good at the top, something at the bottom of the funnel to capture activity, whether it's just a simple contact us form, you know, and go from there. But just make sure everything's being tracked, make sure, you know, you're getting the proper data into your system so you have something to work with. Benjamin Ard (17:42.792) I love that. Incredible advice for everyone listening. That is so good. Justin, we have run out of time. If anyone would like to connect with you and find you online, how and where can they find you? What's your recommended way for them to reach out? Justin Cruz (17:59.639) Yeah, you could definitely just follow me on LinkedIn. That's a platform that I'm always active on. I've also just launched a sub stack called Marketing Focused. So releasing at least one monthly newsletter and just trying to create a community to help marketing leaders and founders who are trying to navigate all of these problems and these challenges that we're facing as marketers. So yeah. Those are some great places to reach out. Benjamin Ard (18:31.468) Love it. That's amazing. Well, Justin, thank you again so much for your time, your energy, and all of your insights. We really do appreciate it today. Justin Cruz (18:39.682) Thanks Benjamin, appreciate you having me.