How Can First-Party Research Turn B2B Content Into a Scalable Growth Engine?

Donna Parent (00:02) and then once it's all gone through that process, that's how quickly we're able to generate these reports. Because nobody likes research, primary research, that's six months old or a year old. Like we're in an instant gratification environment. I get upset if Amazon can't do same day delivery. Benjamin Ard (00:45) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Donna. Donna, welcome to the show. Donna Parent (00:51) Thanks, Ben. Benjamin Ard (00:51) Donna, I'm excited to have you today. This is a subject that I genuinely am curious about. I want to learn more because I feel like it's this huge content advantage when you take on this strategy. But Donna, before we dive into that, let's let the audience know who you are and get to know your background, work history, all that fun stuff. Donna Parent (01:11) Sure. So hey, thanks again. I'm excited to be here. ⁓ My name is Donna Parent and I've been in marketing now for about 25 years, believe it or not. The time has flown by. I started off in the newspaper business and quickly found my way in my home to marketing. I've always worked at enterprise software companies, entrepreneurial environments. B2B has been my primary home, but I do have B2C background as well, which actually I've quite enjoyed. Maybe someday I'll be able to get back into the B2C side as well. But for now, I continue on Enterprise B2B software. And I've worked for companies, global companies, companies that have had as few as 50 employees, 2,000s of employees through acquisitions. So. My sweet spot though is really those core entrepreneurial environments where there isn't a lot of red tape and we're able to get things done quickly. We're able to maneuver and try innovative new strategies, especially now that we're looking at AI. so having the ability to do that and to build fluid marketing strategies is something I quite enjoy and building revenue generating teams. Benjamin Ard (02:28) Love it. That's amazing. Well, Donna, when we were emailing back and forth about the subject that we wanted to talk about today, you brought up this cool point and you work for a company called Dynamo Software and you guys focus on first party research when it comes to your content. You know, what that does is spark meaningful conversations. It makes a scalable content engine, all sorts of incredible things with reputation and media. I want to dive into the strategy. That's what we're going to focus in on. I want to hear all the good news here that you've got. So first things first, why did you decide to put this focus on first party data for your content. Why the emphasis there over other strategies when it comes to marketing and content? Donna Parent (03:09) Yeah, so. This strategy really came to be about 10 or so years ago when I was at another company called Identity Force. And it really came out of this notion of how do we build more credibility in the market? How do we push out meaningful insights that matter and make it actionable? So there's nothing better than having primary research data out there in a way that tells a story that gets people engaged and helps them see that the company who is publishing the data is doing it in a way to help them, to help the consumer of the data. So when the strategy was first built in terms of looking at the market, this was more from a B2C perspective then. So we were out surveying consumers and we were asking them, know, behaviors around how they protect their own passwords and how they scams in general, things that they're looking for around identity theft protection, features, functions, capabilities, to obviously help us be able to deliver a product to the market that would be more impactful and more proactive to consumer needs. And as that strategy did very, very well, when I came into Dynamo on the B2B side, I knew that this company had done surveys previously, but not much had come from the data. Matter of fact, the comments I heard was, know, it's a struggle to get people to take the surveys and then, you what do we do with the data? And there wasn't follow through on it. So you have to have a strategy in You have to have a plan in place. always tell my teams, if we don't have a plan, it's not going to happen. You have to have a plan behind any strategic effort that you're trying to make, along with measurements of how you're going to determine success. and how you're going to continue to improve because it's never a one-shot deal. And if you want to make something like this into a program, you really have to make sure that you're reviewing it regularly so that you can do continuous improvements that also will help increase engagement and credibility and also get you noticed. So. This company now, Dynamo, focuses on the private investment community. And so we have a very large client base. And in addition to that, we're out talking to a lot of new potential clients or prospects. So what I wanted to do was come up with a schedule, a quarterly schedule. based on audience and theming and be able to go out to the market both within our own database and also to partner with maybe ⁓ other providers that we work with. ⁓ or other marketing partners to collect about a hundred or so responses per survey because that's enough for me to be able to come out with data and research that people will find interesting enough. So that process in place and you know, we're a very scrappy team. So this is not 30 plus people in marketing here. have less than 10 people in marketing, but we have ⁓ a great extension of partners, PR and communications and search and SEO and web development and marketing and brand agency. we have this great network of folks, but. because that great network of folks, they're very busy with all the other items we need them doing. I knew that this was gonna stay an internally focused project for the most part. So when it's an internally focused project for the most part, that means the CMO really has to step up on a small team and be able to also get the work done. So that was my commitment to the project is I'm not going to offload this and make this a burden onto my other internal folks. I'm not going to offload it and make it a burden to any other external folks. It's got to come from from me getting hands on, being responsible for the data and the quality of the data coming in. That means looking at every single response and making sure these are real people from the industry and making sure that we have complete responses so that we're not analyzing data that's incomplete and making assumptions that could be directionally not accurate. So all of that in mind, you're just catching me the day after completing the 14th research report for Dynamo. My day recently yesterday, was just crazy going through data. And I do have a process, and it's very manual and involves a lot of printouts. But because I'm the one who has been so close to all the data for these last 14 reports. It's very easy for me to think back and say, ⁓ let me connect the dots here. There's a trend here. This actually is interesting because I remember last year when we asked this question, we didn't see the level of response or positive responses or negative responses. So I kind of have a lot of it collectively in my head from doing the reporting and the analytics. But I really want to make sure that the research we're putting out to the market is research I know It's accurate. It's meaningful and It's unlike anything else out there. We don't charge people for it. It's it's free It's part of a whole report that we publish We just want people to engage and to have the conversations internally to better improve in this case their investment workflows in the case Previously what was identity theft protection is about how do you protect your family? How do you protect your? workplace environment. How do you protect all the things that matter most to you in a way so that scammers and hackers will not take your livelihood essentially? So I would say the sense of accountability and responsibility that the companies I've worked for have and trust with the reports that get published through the marketing team. know, signal to me also the validation that they know this type of content, this type of primary research delivers to the industry, how critical it is to the industry, and how important it continues to be to further protect the brand of the company who's putting out the research. And you know, Ben, we use this research in so many different ways. We, you know, publish it through a big media campaign so there's press releases involved there's pre pitching to the media so then there's articles that get published obviously that third party content right now is so much needed for AI search and for LLM discoverability. We do webinars, so we generate more digital content. We do infographics. We do a lot of social media themes around this, teasing elements of the research findings. So there's so many different pieces that we're able then from a reuse standpoint to get from delivering this type of quality content quarterly. And it's a big commitment to do it quarterly. Like I said, it's a discipline, it's a schedule. For a whole day, morning, day and night. It's all I'm focused on and everyone knows, she's on Do Not Disturb, she's writing, she's researching right now. and then it goes over into design, and then it goes through proofreading, and then once it's all gone through that process, that's how quickly we're able to generate these reports. Because nobody likes research, primary research, that's six months old or a year old. Like we're in an instant gratification environment. I get upset if Amazon can't do same day delivery. People want to know that they have access to this data and they're going to be able to use it somehow. At least see where they rank against peers, see what their colleagues are thinking about, understand what the shifts are in the industry, influence future product development. People want to be able to know that that's happening, not that they take a survey and maybe they'll hear from us in six months, you know, what the results were. So we run these surveys for no more than two months. The third month is the writing and the actual design of the research report and then it's out to market. So we're talking like we're turning these around very, very quickly. Benjamin Ard (12:03) love that. So there's so much to unpacked and digest from everything you just shared. A couple highlights that I love and then a couple things I want to double click on from what I heard. Number one, I love that you decided to make this a quarterly event. I think too often we go out there and say, well, let me get some data. Let me go ahead and do this and have one time some kind of a report. I think the consistency provides a lot of value. So for anyone listening, If you're looking at first party data, find a schedule, find an opportunity to do that. I think that's really, really insightful. I also love that you talked about all the different ways that you distribute the content, the ways that you get it out to the media and third party sites and first party and all sorts of cool stuff. I think there's so much that can be done. I love how you're getting the full value out of that. Now, one of my questions is when you're creating the surveys and you're going out there and trying to get these responses. How do you guide the survey? mean, are you writing the report in advance kind of in your mind? I mean, obviously you've talked about you've done 14 of these. How do you know the kinds of questions that you're gonna wanna ask to help dig and find some unique insights? How much of your quarterly surveys are the same? And how much do they differ from report to report or survey to survey? Donna Parent (13:21) Yeah, great. It's a great question. So the first year doing this was the foundational year, right? So in 2022, we did our first one. I joined the company in April of 2022. The first one came out in the fall of 2022. Then we got into a quarterly schedule in 2023. So that was really building off a foundation. The first one was LP, limited partner asset allocator audience focused in the private investment community. As we moved into 2023 and started to build out a quarterly schedule, we looked at who our core audiences were. So we looked at general partners and asset managers. I just mentioned limited partners, asset allocators. We even looked at hedge funds. And then we looked at fund accountants in private equity and venture capital and then AI came in. So at this point, all of those topics have been covered at least once, now twice. The report is the one that I just finished up yesterday. That one will publish at the end of February. So that'll be our second annual version of that. The way we come together on the survey, so you know, what are we going to ask? It's really a collaborative effort between marketing, product, sales, and a little bit of account management as well. And then externally, we also run it through our strategic PR and communications team because we also want to make sure we're hitting on the latest industry trends or the hot topics that are being covered. So to really provide that credible and meaningful authoritative content, we need to make sure all of these audience are also involved in making sure that the questions that we're gonna go out to market with will matter to the audience that we're polling. So once that happens and we build, know, the first report comes out. It is easier to do the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth versions of that particular report because we build off the questions. We introduce at least three new questions each report. We might retire a previous question because maybe it just didn't get enough activity in the sense of not enough media, press interest, or people just didn't find it that interesting in general. We'll scale it back, but we'll add new fresh insights, fresh questions based off of what's happening, based off of what we're hearing from our clients, based off of what we're seeing in the industry. And so we'll continue to refine the survey based off of those elements and then we push out the next survey. is a level of consistency that you need from report to report in order to do the comparative analysis. And that's what people really lean into, right? I want to see year over year what's changed. How is this changing? And what does that mean to me? And what should I be thinking about? do I agree with that as a consumer of reading this research? Is this what my firm is thinking about? Am I feeling that same? I might also add an inflection point. So we have to make sure that there is some core foundation of consistency year to year in these reports to do the comparative analysis because that's what people really enjoy seeing along with fresh content, fresh insights, recommendations, other third party references also go into the research. So we may have a stat that's interesting and then we look for other areas in the industry. Is this what other research is saying? Or is it maybe contradictory? That could be interesting too. So we don't just report on everything being consistent among the industry because there could be times when maybe there was some inconsistency. And so we build off of that too. The point is we want to make sure when we go to market with these research reports, they're defensible. And it's enough of a view, a comprehensive view to show the full picture. Benjamin Ard (17:32) I love that. So there's a ton in there as well. love the comparative analysis really is one of those big insights. I think that's a great lesson for anyone looking at first party data, putting that into their content marketing, because it gives the context of the whole scenario. It tells you, okay, well, here's a number, but you may not. that good? Is that bad? Like, what does that mean? But if you go in and you can tell the full story, Hey, just three months ago or six months or a year ago, here's where it was at. It's going up, it's going down, things of that nature. And now I have the story, which is ultimately what resonates with me and how I can connect myself to the data. So I love that. Well, Donna, we're almost out of time, but I would be remiss if I couldn't ask you a question about AI. Everything I feel like has to involve AI on one hand. This is going to be kind of a two-parter. So I apologize. It's going to be on both ends of the spectrum. On one hand, has AI played a role in analyzing the data and helping you generate the materials and the reports, things of that nature, using the large language models in a way that can interpret the data, perhaps find insights, things like that. And then on the flip side, how is having first party data. influencing these no-click searches inside of large language models and bringing the attention to you and your brand. Donna Parent (18:56) Those are big questions, Ben. Benjamin Ard (18:59) Yeah, that was, that was a two big questions crammed into one. So I apologize on that one. Donna Parent (19:03) Those are great questions. let me first address the AI component to the research report. So I've been doing these for a while before even AI ⁓ is where it's at now. And I have tried to synthesize some of the data through AI. Unfortunately, what happens is it typically will mix up numbers and percentages, which will create inaccurate outputs. I think like with everything, and we all see the disclaimers when we're trying to generate things from AI. Benjamin Ard (19:31) Mmm. Donna Parent (19:41) It's not always accurate and you need to be really careful. So I've kind of stayed clear of trying to synthesize data through AI for these research reports. But what it does do for me, is sometimes, especially when I reach around 11 o'clock at night in my writing, sentences start to not make the best sense. And so it will help me with coming up with a better way to say something that I'm trying to say, but at that point, I'm reaching a bit of, I'm hitting a wall, right? And I need a little bit of help. So it does help with refining some of the sentence structures. helps me with going out and finding that third party data points that I might be looking for. to either underscore a point or to challenge a point. So it helps with the research, that additional extension of research, and it can help me kind of to refine some of my thinking and my analysis of, wait, I see this in this and make sure my percentages are right. Like, does that make sense? So it's a great friend to work with and to bounce ideas off of, but I would not rely on it. And I caution the audience not to rely on it to synthesize data in a meaningful way that then you can use to generate a report. So be careful ⁓ with that. Yeah, but I will say the first party data point is near and dear to my heart. Benjamin Ard (21:02) Love it. Love it. Yeah, 100%. Good warnings. Donna Parent (21:11) We really within Dynamo completely re-hauled our marketing strategy in May of last year as AI search was ⁓ really coming into play and third party content was the name of the game even more so. mean, third party content's always been critical to a marketing strategy. Press, media, top tier, analysts, research reports, getting out there, getting referenceability, Wikipedia, product review sites. These are all things that most marketers have been working with for many many years and this is not a new concept. What is new though is making sure that the quality of the content that is also going out I know they talk a lot about volume of content But you want to also make sure the quality of the content and where it's appearing continues to be top tier because that does matter. And so these research reports, you know, when we're out and working on the strategic PR and communication strategy, we want to make sure that we're able to, for instance, we have a relationship with Forbes and the Forbes tech council. So oftentimes we're able to weave in data from our research reports into editorial that then gets published on Forbes, which is very meaningful. SourceForge is another great source for that too, where we're able to deliver editorial content that has to be credible, it has to be authoritative, and it has to drive meaningful insights. And so we're also able to reference our primary research data through those kind of resources as well. So we put more of a lens in creating content that can also help to not so much promote but further showcase the meaningful data that's coming out of the industry through our primary research. Benjamin Ard (23:02) I love that. Well, Donna, we have run out of time. I love your process. I love how you're collecting first party data. It's on this regular interval. You're creating these fresh insights. You're comparing it to its own other data, these other surveys. You're showing the story. You're publishing it on different platforms. It's influencing your brands appearance in no-click searches with large language models. There's so many cool things. This is going to be like a marquee episode for anyone listening. This is awesome. Donna, for anyone who's listening, who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Donna Parent (23:38) Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn. And if you need any help or you'd like to learn more, I'm very open to talking to people and sharing whatever I've learned. Benjamin Ard (23:50) I love it. For everyone listening, regardless of what platform you're on, scroll down to the show notes. We'll have all those links and everything right there so you can click on the link and connect with Donna. Donna, again, thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been incredible. Really appreciate the time and the insights today. Donna Parent (24:05) Thank you, Ben.