Consider this episode of the Marketing Smarts Live Show a beacon for B2B marketers seeking to elevate their content, engage their audience more effectively, and achieve tangible results in a crowded digital landscape.
The spotlight is on James Tennant, the founder of Converge, a platform dedicated to catapulting B2B content into the limelight. Over a decade of experience under his belt, James shares invaluable tips on how you can break through the noise and ensure their content resonates with the right audience.
Collaborative Content: The Secret Sauce
One of the standout strategies James advocates is the power of collaborative content. The benefit isn't just about creating content; it's about creating conversations, building relationships, and enriching your content with diverse perspectives.
Collaborative creation not only enhances the value of your content but also sets the stage for a more effective promotion, as contributors become natural advocates, sharing the content within their networks.
Tackling the Challenges: Time, Overwhelm
Time, or the perceived lack of it, is a recurring theme that many marketers grapple with. James challenges the notion of not having enough time, suggesting it's more about priority than availability.
He also touches on the overwhelm that marketers might feel when faced with the plethora of channels and repurposing opportunities.
His advice? Ground your strategy in thorough planning and research—before content creation—to avoid feeling swamped when it's time to promote the content.
Measuring Success
How do you know you're hitting the mark? James points to engagement as a key indicator of successful content promotion. It's not just about the sheer volume of views or likes; it's about meaningful interactions that eventually guide your audience down the funnel toward becoming loyal customers.
Embedding Promotion in Your Strategy
James's parting wisdom emphasizes the importance of integrating promotion into the very fabric of your content strategy. It's not an afterthought; it's a critical component that deserves as much attention and intentionality as content creation itself.
* * *
Check out the video for more details, and the full podcast (link below the video) for the entire insightful conversation.
Don't miss future episodes: Subscribe to the Marketing Smarts Live Show on YouTube. And to catch up on all previous episodes, check out the full playlist on YouTube.
Episode Details, Guest Information, and Referenced Links
Episode No. 71
- Live date: February 26, 2024
- Episode link: youtube.com/watch?v=vHKV1k9kebA
- Original podcast episode: Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content: James Tennant on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]
Guest's social media profiles:
- Twitter/X: @JamesConverge
- LinkedIn: James Tennant
MarketingProfs resources referenced in the show:
- Marketing Influencers: Four Ways to Elevate Your Content Strategy and Amplify Your Outreach
- Traditional Content Marketing Is Broken—Here's How Amplified Marketing Can Fix It
"In B2B News" article referenced in the show:
"From the #mpb2b Community" links referenced in the show:
Transcript: Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content, With James Tennant
Hello to all my Marketing Smarts Live viewers today. I'm super excited to bring you yet another episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show.
This week's topic is all about Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content.
So, if you're ready to get your learn on, buckle up and let's get ready to rock and roll.
Hey, I'm your boy George B. Thomas, speaker, trainer, catalyst, and host of this show, the Marketing Smarts Live show, and the Marketing Smarts podcast found on your favorite podcast app.
Our guest clips today are brought to you by none other than James Tennant.
James Tennant, founder of Converge, a content promotion platform that helps B2B businesses reach significantly more of their target market.
He has 12+ years of experience helping B2B companies and organizations of all sizes across many industries create and share content that educates, inspires, and brings value to their audiences.
James has freelanced for eBay, Gumtree, Universal Studios, and the UK Government, as well as hundreds of other businesses.
Now, remember the clips of James Tennant today are pulled from the full Marketing Smarts podcast episode, and if you want to listen to the full interview with James Tennant and myself, make sure to tune into the Marketing Smarts podcast, link to the full show will be in the description below after the live show ends.
Now, in this episode, again, I'm talking with James Tennant about Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content.
In this first clip, I wanted to ask what success or the best look like abd is there a template or hack to help us get there when we're talking about Maximizing Reach and Promoting and Amplifying Content.
Here's what he had to share...
James: I want to start this off by saying best is subjective, and best is what your audience thinks is best, not what you think is best. Those are the first two things I'd start this with.
I don't think there's a template for this that would work for every business. There's a template that I use for my business, but it wouldn't work for a financial company or for a law firm. But there is one type of content I can give which I think would answer both of these questions in that it's a very good type of content that you can create, that every company can create today that would maybe tick a "best" box, and it helps you promote your content as well. It's something that, hopefully, ticks both of the boxes here.
That is collaborative content. Every company should be doing this. This is a no-brainer for everybody. There's not an industry this wouldn't work for. There's not a company that this wouldn't be easy for a content marketer to implement from today.
Collaborative content does two things. One, it opens the door to building relationships with people that you want to build relationships with within your industry, whether they be potential customers or people that you want to build your personal network with. It adds more value to the content because you're bringing industry experts in to share their advice and their opinions on topics, so it's not just you all the time, it's a wide range of opinions and advice that makes a piece of content, I think, in most cases, more valuable than if just a single person was doing it. Finally, it means that when you come to promoting that content, you have a handful of people who have been active, who've contributed to that content, who want that content to be seen by lots of people as well, because they're in it.
Hopefully, you'll build up relationships that you want to build relationships with, you've created what I would consider to be potentially a better or best piece of content, and when it comes to promotion, you now have as many people who have contributed to help you get that content out in front of their networks and beyond.
I hope that ticks the box on everything. It's a really easy one. It's something I tell companies all the time; one of the first things you should look to do, if you're not already doing it, is create more collaborative content.
Is all your content about you by you?
Are you bringing in others to your content to add value?
If you are, what does you collaboration content look like?
Put the answer to that in the chat pane or let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #mpb2b and, of course, tag me using @georgebthomas.
We'll get back to James Tennant and his thoughts on Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content, But first, I have to ask...
Are you part of the MarketingProfs community? If not, become part of the MarketingProfs community by heading over to mprofs.com/mptoday - That's mprofs.com/mptoday.
Now, it's time for one of my favorite sections...
In The B2B News - Where we talk about breaking B2B news or really important tips we find on the Google news tab related to you and your B2B business. This week, the title is...
Did Martech Break B2B Marketing?
If so, does AI present a solution or just bring us back to the same old question: Which comes first, marketing or technology?
The birth of marketing technology brought so much potential to the marketing department.
It was the early aughts. The Internet was booming... The cloud was clouding... Adobe and Salesforce were innovating. And martech was about to turn the world on its head.
I (The author of the article) was a young, freshly minted MBA with a background in computer science, and a two-year stint doing software marketing at IBM. I'd just been hired by Red Hat, an upstart open-source company with a lot of momentum.
"Hey kid," they said. "We just signed up for this Eloqua thing. We need you to set it up and figure out how we use it." We were one of Eloqua's first customers and that's where my adventure with marketing automation began.
We were doing it all back then, with very little playbook guidance:
Lead magnets.
Lead capture forms.
Lead scoring.
Lead ranking.
Lead routing.
Lead nurturing.
Tracking prospect activity on our website.
It was empowering. Plus, marketing was getting some extra respect in board meetings.
To read this article, check out the link below when the live show is over.
So let's get back to James Tennant and his Marketing Smarts podcast episode.
In this second clip, I asked James what are the hurdles that most B2B marketers or maybe just marketers face pertaining to Maximizing Your Reach and Promoting and Amplifying Your Content.
Here is what he had to share.
I wonder, are you dealing with any of these?
James: From the report that we do, there's quite a few challenges. Again, the biggest one, as we've already mentioned, is the lack of time, which I would say isn't necessarily a lack of time, it's more a question of priority. If you're prioritizing content promotion, as you should be, you wouldn't have no time to do it within your schedule. That's the big one. Every year we keep hearing it, time, time, time. As I said, it's not really, it's priority.
The others that we hear about, we often get comments from people that they feel a bit overwhelmed about all of the stuff that needs to be done to promote content. It depends really on the type of content that you're producing and where you feel it needs to go that I think leads to that feeling of overwhelm. If you've done your research and you know what type of content to produce and where to put it and the formats you need to put it in, I don't think you would feel overwhelmed.
I think this is when someone has possibly got a library of content and they're producing content regularly, and then now they've thought, "I need to promote that. Where do I start? I need to distribute this content across all these different channels. That means I need to start a Threads account. How active are we on Twitter? Have we been doing anything on Twitter? I need to get on LinkedIn. We need to start a YouTube channel." Repurposing would probably make someone feel quite overwhelmed as well. Like we've done a video, how do we turn that into a podcast and a blog, and then how do we put all of this video series together in a downloadable report?
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the idea of doing content promotion, I think the problem there is a lack of planning and research in an earlier stage of your content strategy. Go back and fix that first, and you'll feel a lot less overwhelmed when it comes to doing the content because you're going to know exactly what you're creating and exactly how to promote it.
Those are the two big challenges that we see that businesses face. The other one, which I sort of touched on before, is communication between departments. If you have a sales department or stakeholders above you that don't necessarily understand why it is you're doing what you're doing, what you're doing affects them and the bottom line of the business, then you need to have those conversations. Everyone needs to be on the same page when it comes to creating content and promoting content.
So, communication with stakeholders, communication with other departments that are relevant to yours, working out that content promotion should be a priority and not just something you need to find time to do, avoid feeling overwhelmed by planning your promotion before it gets to the point where you need to do the promotion.
Are you dealing with a lack of time?
Are you prioritizing your content promotion?
Do you have a problem with being overwhelmed around your content promotion process?
Are you trying to be everywhere?
Does the word repurposing your content exude fear in your heart?
What about your communication? Is it streamlined and healthy or...
Well now!
We will get back to James Tennant in a few minutes but first it's time for some...
Dope B2B Learnings From The Vault of MarketingProfs Articles
That's right, It's time to dig into the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two pieces of gold to help you be a better B2B marketer.
Article one this week is: Marketing Influencers: Four Ways to Elevate Your Content Strategy and Amplify Your Outreach by Andrea Lehr
An engaging content strategy has been an essential part of many a successful marketing campaign in recent years. However, only 30% of marketers say their content marketing efforts are effective.
Luckily, there are now thousands of industry leaders out there who share their expertise online.
They work hard to cultivate relationships and maintain their position as an authority within the industry, and connecting with them can help your brand tap into the power of influencer marketing—an outreach strategy that goes hand-in-hand with content marketing.
Partnering with influencers helps get your message in front of a much larger audience and drive conversions, as well as help accelerate buyers' decisions.
Article two this week is: Traditional Content Marketing Is Broken—Here's How Amplified Marketing Can Fix It by Lindsay Tjepkema
Content marketing seemed easy at the beginning. Blogs were new and wildly popular, and marketers saw an opportunity—a way to more personally and more directly connect with their audiences, without the usual number of barriers between brand and audience.
That was good, for a while. Brands developed relationships with their audiences that stepped away from sales talk; instead, brands acted as an expert resource.
Search engine optimization got added to the mix as marketers embedded keywords in blog posts to ensure their content could beat others vying for an audience's attention.
However, SEO strategy and the pressure to compete eventually led to a focus on content quantity—in service to search engines, not the audience.
Want to keep learning more? If so, check the links in the description below after the live show to get access to both amazing MarketingProfs articles.
OK, back to James Tennant... Let's dive back into this conversation of Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content
In this clip, I wanted to ask James how do we know we've reached Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content nirvana? Meaning, what does success look like?
Here are his thoughts...
James: Yes. More often than not, you'll probably see things like an increase in engagement on your content, wherever that's living, whether it's on your blog or it's on a social media channel or a YouTube channel. More often than not, you'll see more people viewing it, more people engaging with it. That's the start, really, that's how you'll start to see that your promotion is having an effect.
That's top-of-funnel activity, but that has a habit of trickling its way down. You start off with generating more awareness and more engagement with the content or marketing activity that you're doing, hopefully that leads people down a funnel toward becoming a customer. From what I've seen when I talk to businesses and the feedback that I get from them when they actually actively start promoting their content is they start to see that it's more than just their colleagues or the people in their current network that are actually viewing and reading their content.
Those are the metrics that you're going to notice initially. It will take a while before you start to see some of the other stuff, like sharing their email for a gated download, becoming a newsletter subscriber, or a subscriber to a podcast or YouTube channel. Those things will happen, usually after several touchpoints. People rarely dive in after seeing one thing. It's usually a few things when they realize this is providing me with a lot of value, this is worth my time now.
I would say keep an eye on top-of-funnel metrics first. If you're doing it right and you've done your research, everyone is on board and it's all going well, you'll see probably a significant increase in those metrics first. That should tell you that you're on the right path. You still have to monitor it and make sure, because traffic and views for views' sake is not always valuable. You want the right people reading and engaging with your content, but it's a good start. That will help you know we are starting to reach more people, now let's make sure these are the right people.
Are you seeing things like increased engagement from your audience or more views?
Are you seeing things like more sales meetings, deals created, or sales made?
Are you seeing that your audience is growing?
We're going to get some words of wisdom from James Tennant here in a few minutes but right now, it's time to turn the spotlight on you, the MarketingProfs community. Yep, time for...
From The #MPB2B Community
We searched far and wide in the #MPB2B universe to find amazing information and conversation to bring to the masses.
So, first, make sure you are using the hashtag, and second, make sure you have fun and add value to the community.
Then, we'll spotlight you or your crew on the show. This week, it's...
Kathleen Gaines
Driving Lead Generation Strategies and Corporate Marketing Training for Brands and Agencies Utilizing the Largest B2B Marketing Community and Content Creators
Does your brand track social media KPIs?
♥? Likes...
?? Followers...
?? Sales Leads...
Fact is, your reputation is defined by the conversations on social—with or without you.
Is your audience reacting to your posts?
Are you there to answer support requests?
Are people talking about your brand—good or bad?
If you're not yet tracking your social media marketing, here's how to get started.
https://lnkd.in/eTW7XHW5
#mpb2b #b2b #marketing #socialmedia #followers #salesleads
But you need to check out the description and click that link to check out the post and read or learn more!
Marketing Smarts viewer, I have to ask... are you going to be next to get the spotlight?
Remember, community, use the hashtag #mpb2b on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and get the light shined on your awesomeness in the next episode or a future episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show!
Pro-tip, it won't hurt if you tag me in your post as well I'm @georgebthomas on LinkedIn and Twitter.
OK, let's kick it back to James Tennant and some words of wisdom around this topic of Maximizing Your Reach—Key Concerns in Promoting and Amplifying Your Content.
Here is what James Tennant wanted to leave us with...
James: Honestly, I think the best advice I can give, I don't know if these are words of wisdom necessarily, is to bake your content promotion into your content strategy from the beginning. It can no longer be a when-I-find-the-time tactic. There's too much noise. Organic reach on search and social media is diminishing all the time. You have to get active and relentless with your content promotion. The only way to do that effectively and to know that you're going to be able to do it consistently is to put it into your strategy and schedule and treat it as something that is as important as creating content in the first place.
I kind of just reiterated a lot of what we talked about today, but if there is one takeaway that people get from listening to this, it's that. Make sure that you and your organization treat content promotion as importantly as they treat content creation, and you'll probably find that the content you're producing and have produced in the past will start to have a lot more of the impact on your business that you want it to have.
Is your promotion strategy baked into your process?
Are you relentless with your promotion efforts?
Is it (Promotion) in your strategy?
Have you enjoyed today's journey? Let us know. Use that hashtag #mpb2b on whatever platform you are joining us on.
