Chapter 1: The Customer Compass: Engage, Listen, Learn
Creating and building traditional buyer personas is such an old-school way of thinking about audience research, development, and definitions.
To me, it’s a company-first approach.
“Let’s spend time creating a fictitious representation of our ideal buyer by doing surveys, maybe talking to a few people, and doing some third-party research.”
Blah!
I'm not saying personas aren’t valuable. They are. What I’m suggesting is that how we build them and the things we’re trying to understand about our “ideal buyers” needs to change.
We need to focus more on the emotive attributes, the problems, the places and content they like to engage with, and who they respect and trust.
And we need to talk to more real people and use communities and social networks to truly understand who the ideal buyer really is.
Most buyer persona resources tell you to focus on surface-level, somewhat generic facts.
Instead, go deeper into the mind of the buyer and study them in a way that’s truly people-first.
Social signals are everywhere and getting pulled to the front of all things marketing and selling.
Why? Because content is everywhere, increasing the cost of getting in front of the right people, while also driving up opportunity costs.
This tip is about making sure you're listening for all of your brand's social signals and using them wisely when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.
First, here are a couple types of signals to watch for.
Intentionally choosing to follow a group’s decisions because you want to signal your allegiance and worthiness of belonging is called a reputational cascade. It's the signal people give when they join your community, buy your product, or do anything else that forms a connection with your brand.
The other side of this is an informational cascade. Basically, this is how popular things become more popular and unpopular things stay unpopular.
Now let's talk about how you influence the signals.
1) Champion your customers. Bring to market all the amazing things they're doing and show how it’s impacting their business and careers.
2) Find people who are helping similar buyers and customers solve different problems. Host events, create original content, do research together, or build a free tool.
3) Amplify the voices of people who share similar beliefs. Listen, engage, and learn from them.
4) Partner with people who your buyers and customers already trust and respect.
Now the question becomes where and how you can use these signals.
If you’re in a larger organization, consider having someone be responsible for organizing the “Voice of the Market.” This is similar to how we think of Voice of the Customer (VotC) but it includes everyone who’s part of your ICP and market.
The truth is people are becoming more influenced by what other people choose. This is partly thanks to algorithms and partly their own ability to share what's going on in their lives.
It’s time to lean in or get left behind.
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Educate, educate, educate. I can't stress this enough.
Buyers and customers want value-add content and experiences more than ever before. They're saying, “Stop wasting my time. This doesn't have to be a five-hour course with a certification.”
The key question to ask is how much of your content-led and event-led growth strategy is about educating people versus talking at them. Let me give you an example.
Take a standard webinar. Most aren’t structured in a way that will leave someone with a better understanding of X topic. There's a conversation, there may be some ideas and tips, but they don’t answer the question of how to practically do something different or new.
Instead, design the webinar with the mindset and intentionality that any person who attends or watches the recording should be able to do X afterward. Don't pontificate about a topic. Make it specific, actionable, and focused on the outcome you're trying to create.
Too much content and too many webinars are surface-level ideas or tips that don't go deep enough to create actual change. They might inspire it, but they don't deliver on the how.
Deliver the how and you'll already be better and differentiated from 80% of your competitors.
Right now, go do an audit of your content and events, and look at how many are truly teaching people versus stating the obvious.
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I can't stress enough how important it is to get close to your customers.
Talk to them every week. Learn from them. Ideally, if you can, become one.
Make yourself a weekly if not daily ritual of listening and talking to your customers.
Your P&L and customers will thank you for it.
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Don't ignore or forget to study macro trends.
In my estimation, this is one of the biggest things companies don't spend enough time studying and understanding when it comes to product creation, positioning, and messaging.
You want to take the time to understand the things that are affecting your customers, including how they can help you create a strategic narrative, POV, and story for your brand and product(s). These things are sometimes referred to as “undeniable truths.”
Study the macro trends that are putting pressure on or perhaps creating tailwinds for your market and customers. Then, figure out how you can lean into them to update or create your GTM plan and product strategy accordingly.
I would do this every six months given how fast things move in the world now. I would make it a topic in at least one board meeting per year and at least once a quarter at the executive level.
I believe this is a core job of both the CEO and CMO and is something they should dedicate time to doing on an ongoing basis.
You can get the info you need by talking to customers and buyers, reading the news, going into communities, studying new technology, and so on.
It’s all about connecting the dots when it comes to headwinds and tailwinds, and staying on top of the big ideas and cultural creations that are fundamentally changing the marketplace and the game you and your customers are playing.
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Is intent data a people-first GTM play? It sure is. Here's how I think about intent data.
First-party data is information you get directly from buyers and customers. It's the stuff you can track on your website, in the events and webinars you host, from your product or service offering, and elsewhere. It's super valuable and sacred.
Second-party data is information you agree to share with other partners and parties. It’s things like contacts, deal stage, account data, and contact intel. It's very valuable data that can give you direction on how to influence a relationship or start one.
Third-party data is information you get from sources that measure and track the digital fingerprint and footprints of people. It’s things like ad clicks, search intent, reviews, events, and so on.
Intent data is either explicitly (directly) collected or implicitly (indirectly) collected.
When used in the right ways, intent data will help you learn more about the motivations and desires of your buyers, get you closer to them, and help you design experiences and offers that are more personal.
Check out this simple Account Fit vs. Buying Intent Framework:
Here's a neat framework to help you get deeper into the minds of buyers.
I like it because it provides a lot more substance than your traditional buyer persona template.
It’s great for understanding the buyer from person, problem, solution, and value angles.
You could also look at behavioral attributes like what communities they engage in and the types of interactions they prefer. However, those are getting harder to generalize and determine.
It’s a great framework to use as part of your product positioning and messaging strategy. It can also inform sales outreach, event invites and themes, and how you build targeted programs for integrated revenue campaigns. Plus it contains a ton of great info for your product team.
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Behaviors matter a lot. But have you ever thought about your brand's behaviors?
This tip is all about how to think about using DiSC to create experiences that feel more human.
DiSC is a behavior framework that breaks down like this:
Dominance: These individuals are assertive and direct.
Influence: These individuals are outgoing and enthusiastic.
Steadiness: These individuals are patient and dependable.
Conscientiousness: These individuals are analytical and detail-oriented.
Take a moment and think about your brand and which behavior style it falls into.
Now think about your ideal customer profile and who you sell to. Do they match up?
Then take a moment to think about your brand's voice and tone. Does it match its behavior style?
You get the point. Putting a lens on how your brand behaves is a very interesting People-first GTM exercise.
And yes, brands, just like people, can and even should change their behaviors for different customers or markets. But there's always one or two behaviors that are most dominant.
The question is, how intentional are you at using behavior design and modeling as part of the customer experience?
Oh and by the way, I'm an iD. Surprised? 😉
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This tip is all about account and buyer fit definitions.
Do you know how your company defines fit? If not, go find out.
Do you know the last time the definitions were looked at and possibly updated? If not, go find out.
Does your team use them on a regular basis for campaign planning, messaging and positioning, content offers, and event design? If not, no better time to start than now.
Why am I asking you these questions?
Because to put people first, you need to know who they are. You need to understand them. You need to develop empathy.
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Let's talk about customer journeys.
It's so easy to only look at data and never see all the incredible insights that data doesn't show if you're not looking at it with the right lens.
My advice: create at least one customer journey per week that shows how marketing and sales helped turn a lead into a new customer.
You can also create journeys for how you turned a new customer into a power user or even advocate.
Here's a picture of what one typically looks like.
Use the activity history in HubSpot or Salesforce to find the key moments that led to an account becoming a customer.
Here at TACK, I share a new journey every week during my Monday Marketing Minute update, in our executive meetings, and during our board meetings.
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Buyer personas are both critical to any successful people-first GTM strategy.
Here's a simple three-part framework I like to use to understand buyer personas.
Buying Center - The function or department expressing the need.
Buying Team - Three or more people in the buying center working together on a purchase.
Buyer Personas - The different people who are part of the buying team.
We tend to focus so much on the personas themselves, we forget to consider all the intent signals and interest from the overall buying team.
A great exercise is to map out a couple of typical buying teams to better refine your product messaging, content, and events for the different people within those teams.
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There are better, more people-first ways to think about intent signals and how to use them.
The key is to look at intent from the perspective of the customer journey. Don’t think about the source or type as much. Frame it like a buyer or customer would.
Problem intent
Solution intent
Product intent
Value intent
Advocacy intent
When it comes to intent signals, the focus is typically on numbers two or three—because that’s where a lot of data and intent providers specialize.
The bigger opportunities to make revenue growth more efficient and improve retention are in numbers one, four, and five.
What types of intent are you trying to better collect and use right now?
Chapter 2: The Partner Advantage: Building Alliances
Don’t go it alone.
When I joined HubSpot in 2010, one of the first things I did was start building a squad. I had been a HubSpot customer myself and saw a huge opportunity to help them make their customers more successful using Inbound Marketing. But I knew I couldn't do it alone.
So I sold my vision to lots of people and formed a squad of volunteer HubSpotters who helped me turn it into HubSpot Academy. I'm forever grateful to those people. And the number-one lesson I took from the experience is that trying to do it alone is so much harder. I couldn’t have done it without help.
This tip is all about finding your squad. You probably won't have just one squad, either. Different goals require different people. When thinking about who should be part of your squad, consider your strengths and weaknesses, your past experiences, and how much time you have to dedicate to achieving the goal.
Most importantly, think about who you want to learn from and who will help you get closer to your goal.
It doesn't matter the length or complexity of the goal. Every time you find a partner, the percentage of success goes up.
People-first GTM is all about using relationships and partnerships to create aligned outcomes. Stop building products and trying to serve customers alone. Build a squad and achieve greatness together.
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Here are five of my favorite ways to make your GTM more people-first:
Entertaining and original content with genuine personality
Community engagement led by creators
Easy to try and buy with transparent pricing
Webinars and online events that are interactive, fast-moving, and fun
Membership hub with one-click sign up and exclusive perks
What do they have in common? They all benefit from getting partners (including customers) involved.
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Here’s a simple framework for each pillar of People-first GTM, starting with the most important: partner-led growth.
Partner-led Growth
Identify - Audience, partners, accounts
Collaborate - Create a story, develop a plan, enable teams
Execute - Launch, manage, learn
Content-led Growth
Create - Assets, stories
Amplify - Share the content to the right audience
Measure - The impact and the insights
Event-led Growth
Discover - The right accounts and people
Engage - With the right event and experience
Grow - Pipeline, customers, advocates
Product-led Growth
Acquire - New user acquisition
Adopt - Onboard and get to value fast
Retain - Create habits with users that grow overtime
Community-led Growth
Find - The places where your buyers and customers are engaging
Engage - Participate in conversations
Contribute - Create and deliver value
Member-led Growth
Acquire - Members in your owned community experience
Activate - Get them engaging with content, in conversations, and programs
Convert - Into customers or brand/category advocates
Customer-led Growth
Onboard - Get new customers seeing fast value and success
Partner - Create deeper relationships with customers to deliver more value
Delight - Design moments and experiences that over time make customers fall in love with your product and brand
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Influencers and creators are becoming all the rage. But there are right ways and wrong ways to execute an influencer strategy.
Nick Bennett and Bryan Grover have a fantastic newsletter that breaks this down every couple of weeks. I want to highlight a couple of things they’ve written about.
First, why Community-led Growth is so successful:
1) People are looking for new connections (and to learn new things).
2) People are always looking for a quick, easy way to understand.
3) People are lazy. LOL, It's true!
But where this strategy can go wrong is if you take a company-first approach.
If you’re simply paying other people to promote your brand or product, then it’s a transactional relationship that will start to become obvious to your audience and broader community. There's not a real sense of genuineness. And being genuine is core to great partnerships.
Instead, you need to take a people-first approach to influencer marketing. Enter into longer-term partnerships and relationships with influencers and creators. Structure it so you both win and get value.
And only partner if they believe in what you and your brand believes. If the relationship is purely about money and not about joint value creation, the results will be short-lived.
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Something we should be talking about more: creator-product fit.
The general idea is that the creator you partner with to increase awareness and trust of your product needs to not only be a believer in your product but also a user.
This is the ideal state and almost always true in B2C creator marketing. If you're recommending a product, you better be a user.
However, in B2B, you can pass the sniff test as long as your beliefs align, even if the creator isn't using the product.
Maybe they believe in your approach, but there just isn't a use case for them to use the tool. Or maybe they share your POV on an important subject or set of undeniable facts.
It could even be that they loved a piece of content you created or an event they attended, and that inspired them to become a promoter of your product.
Just because they’re not a user, doesn’t mean they can’t be an effective partner.
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Here's how I think about using a people-first approach with ABX.
Starting from left to right:
1:Many at the top of the funnel: Partner with creators and influencers in your industry to create content. Same goes with some of your employees.
1:Few in the middle of the funnel: Partner with some of the complementary solutions and people in your space to create a joint value prop, and do events and targeted marketing together.
1:1 at the bottom of the funnel: Partner with customers to help you get references and examples in the hands of buyers who are about to turn into customers.
This can of course be applied on the right-hand side of the image, too. That's where Customer-led Growth can really shine.
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Here are some relevant lessons from our experience bringing the TACK Network to life.
Lesson one: Start preparing early and often.
The network was dreamed up back in June 2023, and we started preparing for a launch in late October or early November. We created a doc of key dependent milestones and knew that if we missed even one of those milestones we would have to move the date out. But that forced us to make sure we had enough time to try our best to not miss a key milestone, which helped us say no to other things.
Lesson two: Don't try to do something big alone, ever.
We were purposeful in who we consulted to help us refine our ideas. We created a shortlist of people who could be part of making our vision come to life. And a list of people who would help us share it far and wide when the time was right. People-first all day, every day.
Lesson three: Stick to your North Star, but let the journey take you down the right roads.
We were very confident in what we were trying to build, but we ended up changing the name of it halfway through. We had backup plans for several key components on the project and made sure to never have a single point of failure if we could avoid it. Trust your gut and try not to overthink things. It's better to make a decision than to not make one at all or fast enough.
Remember—it's always better together.
Trying to decide which People-first GTM Offer to lead with? Here's what I recommend.
First, decide which People-first GTM offer you're best at and which one is a good fit for the audience you're trying to acquire.
For example, if you're selling a new product to salespeople, I would go for a product-led growth offer. They want something that's free, easy to use, and gives them immediate value. They don't have time to read content and go to events. They’ve got to close business!
Decide on the offer type—either content, events, or free products—that you'll use as the primary thing that activates the desired audiences. Maybe it's a monthly webinar, a recurring in-person event, a seminal research report, episodic show, or a great free tool.
HubSpot did it with a blog. Drift did it with a podcast. These are examples of content-led growth.
GTM Partners has done it with their in-person roadshow. Salesforce did it with their field events. These are examples of event-led growth.
Notion and Box did it with their free products. These are examples of product-led growth.
Find one thing and one offer format that can be the catalyst to create other types of offers. Start simple and align it to WHO you're trying to build a relationship with.
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Do you know your partner attach rate? Not your sales attach rate, but how much you're partnering across your content-led, event-led, product-led, community-led, member-led, and customer-led motions.
How often do you partner with another person or organization to bring a new offer, campaign, product, or event to life?
Is it 25%? 50%? North of 75%?
My rule is to have it always be north of 75% for anything and everything.
Do a quick audit of your GTM activities and note how much you're leaning into partner-led.
My rule at Drift and Airmeet was that my team had to partner with someone on at least 75% of their activities. For some folks on the team, it was 90% or more.
Now, more than ever, don't try and go it alone.
Don't forget—Partner is the first principle of the PEOPLE-first GTM principles.
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I'm a huge believer in the shift from the HOW Economy to the WHO Economy.
The folks at Reveal created this great breakdown of the shift.
The old winners were companies and Google sharing and pushing information out to people.
Now, people are in near full control of the content creation value chain. They can pull other people into the buying experience and are getting really good at it, doing it much more often and better than brands.
Isaac Morehouse, a ClubPF member, shared this great partnership framework:
Intel - Get the answers to the test from those who know.
Intros - Tap into trust that’s already been built.
Influence - Surround key moments in the buyer journey.
Whether it’s a sales or marketing activity, a new eBook, an hour spent prospecting into an account, or an event, always consider one or more of the three I’s as part of your partnership approach.
For example, if I'm a marketer hosting an event, I might ask my CSM if they’ll introduce me to a customer who could speak at the event. Or if I'm trying to figure out how to get a prospect to take a meeting with me, I might see who they’re connected with and if any of those people are current customers.
This framework works both internally at a company or externally.
The golden rule in today’s B2B GTM landscape is to always ask yourself: “Who can I partner with to make this easier and better?”
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Partner-led is the foundation of the People-first GTM Model. It literally surrounds the channels and offers we use to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. It's a strategy I've been leaning into since my early days at HubSpot, where I witnessed the power of partnering with marketing agencies.
I think of Partner-led in terms of three distinct outcomes: Reach, Referrals, Revenue.
There are so many ways you can use Partner-led to fuel your People-first GTM motions. Here are seven of my favorites:
1) Webinars: From hosts to speakers to co-marketing.
2) Courses: From teaching a class to creating a whole course together.
3) Co-selling: From breaking into an account to learning about the decision-making process to procurement and approvals.
4) Products: From integrations to creating joint value propositions and bundling solutions together to form a strategic alliance.
5) Social takeovers: From a lightning-strike moment to an important offer or upcoming event to amplifying the story or message for both brands.
6) Private events: From dinners to experiences to executive roundtables.
7) Customer evidence: From examples to stories to proof points to references.
Simply put, your go-to-market is better when you go at it together.
Think of it as go-to-network (hat tip to Mac Reddin over at Commsor for that one).
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Here’s a Partner-led thought inspired by the great Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot.
In today’s market, everything is getting harder: organic search, email, social, everything.
Yamini recommends focusing on value over volume. I love that approach.
She offers some great tips on how to do it. I'll add one more.
Look into partnering with other companies who are selling into the same accounts as you. Use tools like Reveal or Crossbeam to identify the overlap and build relationships together.
Some folks are calling this a Nearbound strategy. Whatever you choose to call it, do everything you can to harness the partner advantage. We’re always better when we’re together.
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Partner-led is all about getting to the relationship in different, more natural ways.
In today’s GTM landscape, it’s no longer about taking a linear approach with X number of emails, a few phone calls, and some sub-par LinkedIn engagement.
People-first GTM is about the dance, not the walk. You’re using existing relationships to warm up the relationship you’re hoping to develop. You’re using helpful content with a known author who forms a connection with you, and who you can engage with and ask questions.
It’s about having conversations with people who might be trying to sell to a similar set of accounts or type of buyer and sharing notes.
It’s about asking customers for referrals and being part of the community-building process by teaching other customers how to do what they did.
It’s the idea of six degrees of separation. That’s what People-first GTM is all about.
And now, thanks to technology and social media, the actual proximity of those degrees of separation are extremely short.
It’s the perfect time to partner with people to increase your distribution leverage.
Chapter 3: Content as Catalyst: The Engine of Engagement
Content marketing is on the cusp of a radical shift.
AI will disrupt many types of content, with blogs and eBooks likely to go first.
Here’s how to prepare for the shift:
Create more structured and outcome-based content (e.g. educational content)
Create more unique content (e.g. thought leadership POV content)
Create a tailored and customized content experience (e.g. premium content membership experience)
Create more live content experiences (e.g. in-person and online events)
Create more creators in your business (e.g. people who regularly share their POV)
Create more video content (e.g. micro video content with minimal editing)
Create more original research (e.g. reports and decks about new trends and insights)
Create more microsites (e.g. custom web experience with multimedia content and animations)
A great content portfolio is like a great investment portfolio—they’re both diverse.
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The concept of “thought leadership” has been around for a long time. Yet there needs to be a change in how companies think about doing it.
First, your thought leadership should come from people within the company, not the brand. The brand is not a thought leader—people are! For some reason, we lost that line of thinking.
Second, have a plan for your thought leadership. Don't just do it for the sake of doing it. Thought leadership works best when you do it with the following People-first GTM motions:
Content-led Growth: The thought leader creates original ideas, content, or research about a topic they have deep experience in. This is the foundation for everything else they do. Some go as far as publishing books or creating a manifesto-style document.
Event-led Growth: They speak at events using the content they created as part of the stories they share. They may host workshops or roundtables, hold fireside chats, or present a keynote centered around their core thought leadership topic.
Community-led Growth: They’re active in the places (online and in-person) where conversations are happening about and around their topic of expertise. They're visible and act as a trust-building tool for the brand. They form connections with other thought leaders and create demand for the brand.
Member-led Growth: They offer unique and exclusive content, education, or experiences to people who become members of the brand's owned community. This is a great people-first approach to capturing demand.
Partner-led Growth: Most importantly, they partner with others in their field to evangelize and grow their thought leadership. They do this with content collabs, events, speaking, and more.
Customer-led Growth can also be designed to showcase customers who are doing remarkable things with your product. Build a customer thought leader program that's not just about documenting their success, but that also shows HOW they achieved such success for their career and company.
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Here’s one from the Content-led cookbook, with inspiration from Community-led and Event-led.
Dror Poleg is writing a book.
But he’s writing it in a very untraditional way.
Out in the open with lots of community involvement.
Just take a look at his approach. I recently got the following email from him:
“I’m serializing it. Every week, I’ll share a new chapter with my premium subscribers. Subscribers will get advance access to the book's insights—and their feedback will help shape the final draft.
In addition, premium subscribers will get the following:
📔 A copy of the final book. Physical or digital—your pick.
❤️ An acknowledgment of your name and support in the book itself.
🥂 An exclusive invitation to book launch events in New York, London, and two other cities that will be determined by your votes.”
This is brilliant. He’s leaning into Community-led, Content-led, and Event-led growth strategies to maximize the ROI of his new product—in this case a book.
All while trying to get more people to sign up for his premium subscription product.
Brilliant!
Just imagine how you could apply this approach. There are so many possibilities.
This is a great approach to building relationships at scale, not to mention creating in public, which is a core principle of Content-led Growth.
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AI prompts to write a blog article? Or transcripts from live conversations and interviews?
Which is better? And which is more people-first?
I bet you know the answer.
It’s not even close for me. Always start with live conversations and transcripts. This is why I'm so bullish on the owned media movement.
The two best ways to fuel your Content-led Growth strategy are with events or video-based podcasts and shows. The third-best way is to create short videos that you post internally or on LinkedIn.
Turn all of that video and audio content into transcripts, and let the writing fun begin.
There are going to be more and more freelance and in-house writers and content marketers who specialize in this exact workflow—taking authentic points of view and perspectives and weaving them into content that gets people to think or act differently. Which is what all good content or media should do.
By the way, if you need a recommendation for one, let me know.
Please, please don't ever use AI to write content. Maybe use it to get ideas or create an outline. But I implore you to never use AI to write one piece of content for your brand. It will never be as good as content that comes from the voice and mind of a real person.
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My mind was sort of blown the other day. I was on a call with Nick, and the person we were chatting with made such a good point about how to think about blogging and social posting.
Here's what they said.
Hiring someone to do a post on LinkedIn today is the equivalent of paying someone to write a blog article for you five years ago. And it costs about the same: $800 to $1,500 depending on quality and length.
And guess what… a blog article doesn't come with fast and guaranteed distribution like most LinkedIn posts do if they come from right creator.
🤯
The idea now is to have 2-3 creators write 500-word posts and then combine them into an article for your blog. That's the new People-first approach to blogging and social media.
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This tip is about design partners—and probably not the design partners you’re thinking of.
These partners will help you bring a new cornerstone content asset to life. Here's an example.
When I was at Drift developing “The MQL is Dead,” I partnered with 20 different internal and external stakeholders to validate the story, positioning, and format of the piece.
First, design partners in the traditional sense are like trusted product testers who help you fill in the missing gaps in your product offering. These early partners will work with your team and give timely and high-quality feedback about the product experience.
This exact approach can be applied to both content and events. Here's what I did at Drift.
We started by doing interviews with each partner asking them the same questions to understand if the story, ideas, strategy and tactics resonated and made sense.
Then we partnered with 5-7 people who we interviewed and included as guest experts in the piece. These folks included some of Drift's customers.
Then we took the cornerstone asset—an ungated eBook—and activated it across an entire integrated revenue campaign, making the big idea and story the theme of the campaign. We hosted webinars and events about the topic, spoke at third-party events about it, and turned it into a ton of micro- and zero-click content.
The short of the story is to spend less time creating lots of content assets to power your Content-led Growth strategy, and instead create one or two cornerstone assets each quarter that you do in partnership with buyers and customers. Then, use them to activate your Event-led and Community-led Growth motions.
Special shoutout to Michael Thomas and Campfire Labs for helping us bring the piece to life.
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Authors. They matter—a lot.
Yet few B2B companies lean into the idea of authorship and ownership. I mean, it's called thought leadership for a reason!
For every post you publish on your website or in your owned community, try to have a real author (or authors) behind it, and make sure to get their name out there.
It's probably one of the easiest ways to make your marketing more people-first.
We did this at Drift with the creation of Drift Press and the Drift Podcast Network.
With this approach, the authors become the folks who are actively sharing and talking on social platforms and other social networks. They become the “influencers” for your brand.
So simple, yet so many overlook it.
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Here’s a tip about how to partner with current and potential customers to create a helpful and interesting piece of content. This play is a combo of Partner-led, Content-led, and Event-led growth.
This content should be about one of your products' core value drivers. It should cover the pain and problem that's preventing someone from getting that desired value, the metrics used to measure if the value is being realized, and how your approach to solving it is different. It should teach people how to get XYZ value and how to think about problems differently. And it should inspire them to take action.
First, identify 10 accounts and buyers that you would love to have as customers.
Then share a personal message (or have someone who might have a closer relationship to the person or account send the message).
The message can be framed in a way that says, “We want to feature you in a new piece of research and content that talks about XYZ problem in your industry.”
The ask is a 30-minute interview that will cover 3-5 questions about how they're thinking about this problem, and how they quantify the problem and pain.
You'll probably get three or so people to respond and participate.
Next, do the same thing with five of your current customers. This time, the questions should be about how they solved the problems. Get them to share specific examples and approaches they used to solving the problems.
Now you have two different perspectives about the same topic. Blend them together and create a mini-narrative piece about how to solve the problem by doing X to achieve Y. It should be about 5-7 pages of content with examples and images.
Then do a webinar or short online event ideally featuring one potential customer and one current customer as speakers. Or do a private online event with an interactive experience for each person that's invite-only and have it be a small group discussion about the problem. Or heck, do both.
This piece of content will be great to share with Sales and CS folks who can use it as a way to teach people how to think and solve the same problem. And I bet you’ll be able to turn one or two of those accounts into customers.
Finally, plan to refresh this piece every 6-12 months with fresh perspectives and examples.
***
Here’s a tip about how to move from doing Content Marketing to Content-led Growth.
Content marketing has been around for more than a century. Its roots go all the way back to 1895 and John Deere doing their first printed magazine.
Inbound marketing exploded onto the scene over the last 15 years and gave content marketing more alignment to business outcomes that weren't just about brand awareness and impressions.
Now, the future is about Content-led Growth (CLG) and how to create, distribute, and measure content across the entire customer journey with goals of generating revenue and retaining customers.
CLG takes everything that's already great about content and incorporates a growth model that gives your content a chance to resonate more and have higher ROI.
It starts by defining who you are creating what content for, the stage of the customer journey it’s meant to support, and how the asset relates back to the theme/story your business is telling.
This is followed by a plan for how to use it to create, capture, and/or convert demand into revenue. Each asset is planned with the specific aim of being activated across certain owned and rented channels.
To say it another way, in the days before CLG, content marketing was creating lots of content and hoping some of it would hit. Kind of like the 80/20 rule.
With CLG, you’re being more focused and deliberate. It means creating less content, but better content that gets repackaged and repurposed for different channels and audiences. And it means doing it in partnership with other people inside and outside of your company.
A very mature CLG motion will bring all of the content into one experience that's powered by a Member-led Growth strategy. It means giving away all of the content in an experience that's streamlined and more personalized to each person—one form to fill out once instead of dozens.
CLG is measured in three main ways:
1) Engagement: The leading indicators that inform how well the content is resonating and working.
2) Revenue: The lagging indicators that show the indirect or direct influence on creating pipeline and new and expansion revenue.
3) Adoption: The indicators that show content’s impact on product usage and retention.
***
Here's one type of cornerstone content that I recommend to any business looking to grow past $5 million in revenue.
A course.
I've done this at two of my last three companies and was about to do it at Airmeet, but I ran out of time.
I can say with absolute certainty that a course will help you create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. It's an excellent tool for all GTM teams to use to educate buyers and customers, create and accelerate pipeline, and help expand accounts.
Why? Because a great course is valuable. Anyone who takes the time to consume some or all of your course is showing strong signals of intent. They will leave with a much better idea of your brand, the problems you help people solve, and your unique approach to solving the problems.
The most important things to remember when designing your first course are 1) do it with others, and 2) make it about your unique POV. Teach people why it matters, how it works, and what it looks like. And have lots of different people be teachers in the course. If it's just you teaching the material, it won’t be nearly as engaging or successful. No offense, of course. 🙂
You can take two approaches to designing a course. Start with very little and build it all at once over the course of a couple of months. Or build assets and resources that can be used to fill in the course at a later date.
Whichever approach you choose, you’ll be happy to come away with a great piece of cornerstone content you can use to engage new customers and create revenue.
***
Here’s a great framework I’ve used to start and plan an episodic show.
It starts with understanding the following three things:
Audience Definition - the people who this show should resonate with
Business POV and Philosophy - what you believe in and why
GTM Themes - stories and ideas you want to bring into the minds and hearts of the target audience
Once you have these three things articulated, move on to coming up with a show structure uses the following format and aligns to the steps above:
Show Title
Show Theme
Show Description
Hosts and Guests
Season One Theme
Season One Description
Episodes
Show Flow
Lastly, create a standard set of checklists for launching the show and producing each episode, as well as a distribution checklist to squeeze all of the juice from the content.
***
Most podcasts are geared at reaching a wider audience and activating the top-of-funnel demand creation process.
But why not build a podcast for your customers?
You need to first have enough customers to warrant this approach, but once you do, this type of podcast can be a tremendous asset to help accelerate new business deals, improve customer adoption, and increase customer lifetime value.
Why? Because most of the guests on the show will be customers! What's better for a buyer and a customer than hearing from the voice of another customer? Not much.
When I was at Drift, we did a podcast called Conversation Starters. It was hosted by Sammi, one of Drift's Customer Success Managers. She brought customers and Drift employees onto the show to talk about all the ways they were using Conversational Marketing and Sales to drive pipeline and revenue.
We then repurposed a ton of the podcast content into guides, short clips, and one-pagers for the Sales and Customer Success teams.
PURE GOLD!
***
Content-led Growth is getting harder. But there's one type of content I would definitely be creating a lot more of in the future.
Research-based content.
Why? It's original, AI can't create it, it's factual, and it can be used in dozens of ways across marketing, sales, and customer success.
And the best way to create this content is with someone else (AKA Partner-led).
Work with another brand, an expert, a thought leader, a university, an analyst firm.
This type of content is great for strengthening your POV and building brand awareness and trust.
A great example of this is GTM Partners. Take a look at how they create research-based content with other brands and people.
Finally, here are some great thoughts from the CEO of Databox about his approach.
***
There’s a big difference between a thought leadership category and a product category.
Here's an example.
Thought leadership category: Inbound Marketing
Product Category: Content Management System or Marketing Automation
A big mistake I see is trying to create one category that serves both jobs.
My opinion is that most businesses should spend more time developing and evangelizing a thought leadership category than trying to build a product category. There are some cases where you should do both, and in very rare cases the category can be one and the same.
Think of your thought leadership category as the why and how. The product category is the what.
Why do you exist and how do you help? Followed by what do you offer—AKA what do you sell?
Here are some questions to answer for your thought leadership category or POV:
What's changed or changing in the world?
How are your buyers and customers being affected by these changes?
What problems are they facing in the context of their business related to the macro changes?
What's a new and better way to adapt to these changes?
Answer these four questions and you’ll be well on your way to developing a category that captures and keeps people's attention.
***
One tactical channel more marketers should be paying attention to: YouTube.
Just look at these stats:
YouTube has more than 2.68 billion active users as of 2023.
52% of internet users worldwide access YouTube at least once a month.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google.
YouTube is a very people-first way to go to market. After all, it's a huge library of videos of people!
A great way to get started with YouTube is to repurpose all of your webinar and event content.
Another great way is to set aside 30 minutes every two weeks with experts in your company and do interview-style expert sessions about topics that are aligned with your buyer personas. Try out formats like “They ask, you answer” (hat tip to Marcus Sheridan for that one).
The key is consistency and publishing X number of videos per month. Also be sure to promote the fact that you have a great YouTube channel across other channels like email and organic social to drive subscribers and engagement.
For more inspiration, this YouTube SEO pillar page from Semrush is pretty good.
***
Getting people in a business to share content on the right social channels can be a challenge. Here are some tips on how to make it easier and sustain momentum.
1) Create a weekly theme for everyone to get behind. It could be something simple, like a POV from a recent piece of content, a customer story, or a trending topic.
2) Build simple prompts that they can use to get their post started or even just copy and paste from. Pick the one or two days during the week when everyone ideally posts.
3) Explain why you’re asking people to do this and how it will help the business grow. Sharing the WHY in an authentic way goes a long way. Trust me. And you need to keep reminding people of the why, too.
4) If you don't want to do it weekly, do it once a month. We call it the Monthly Marketable Moment. It could be sharing a new product feature or launch, a nice piece of content, or some other type of offer. You could even make it a quarterly celebration of your customers. This is something I've done in the past.
5) Share the results of everyone's efforts. Show the numbers. Show how people respond. Recognize your teammates in internal channels. Comment and like their posts. Make it fun and a team sport. And try to give out small monetary awards and prizes to people who are doing an awesome job.
***
The best way to create content is to create it in public places.
Not behind closed doors with a “grand unveiling.”
Involve the community. Involve your customers. Involve people with different and opposite points of view.
It will help you build a better promotion and distribution plan.
And you'll build some great relationships doing it.
I like to test new topics or POVs on LinkedIn and get people's reactions. Think of it as your public business journal. LinkedIn Live is another great way to test ideas and refine the story or topic.
Webinars are also a great way to create in public. Think webinar to content asset to micro-content assets. AI tools will make it ridiculously easy to create these assets soon.
Surveys are another great People-first GTM strategy and aren't used nearly enough to create high-quality, original content. And you don't always need a fancy survey tool or massive sample. You can host it on your website, LinkedIn, or with another brand to get enough responses and reactions.
I hope this gives you some ideas on how to build more in public.
