This episode features an interview with Emma Robinson, B2B Marketing Lead at Canva, a global online visual communications platform on a mission to empower the world to design.

In this episode, Emma dives into Canva's shift from individual to enterprise functionality, sharing her thoughts on the inherent value of investing in brand at any stage. She also dives into the increasing importance of word-of-mouth and avoiding the sea of sameness in B2B marketing.

Key Takeaways:

• Brand and creative help you to get potential buyers thinking and feeling, and help you differentiate among a sea of sameness in B2B marketing, and pushes buyers towards action.
• While analyst relations are still important, word-of-mouth and peer-driven buying are increasingly important, potentially reducing some of the importance of analyst reports.
• Traditional SEO is changing, and having high-quality, insight rich content with an authentic point of view will be important.

Quote:

•  Traditional SEO is probably changing somewhat. I mean, most of us who have searched something in recent times will not necessarily be searching just in Google. So, finding ways to make sure that our content will be trained by an LLM in the right ways, you know, people still need answers, but they're getting them in a very different way now. Image search and, you know, tech search and all these different things that will inevitably change what we know as traditional SEO. So, I think for that, it's again, back to the point about being grounded in really good quality content, like colored content that has a point of view that does feel less AI oriented and more really rich in insights insights, for example, like primary research, those types of things, but that's still going to stay. And then I think influencer marketing and things like podcasts and so forth, like all of those sort of authentic moments are going to matter in kind of the new world. So, we're definitely rethinking our search strategy there, and so more to come on that.

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:33) The Trust Tree: Changing perceptions and moving into enterprise

*(23:16) The Playbook: Thinking and feeling to action

*(39:53) The Dust Up: Do you invest in brand equity for the long term?

*(43:53) Quick Hits: Emma’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/
• Connect with Emma on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-robinson-mtkg/
• Learn more about Canva: https://www.linkedin.com/company/canva/
• Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://www.linkedin.com/company/canva/

This episode features an interview with Jean-Christophe Pitié, CMO and Chief Partner Officer at Contentsquare, an experience intelligence platform that helps you gain a deep understanding of your customers’ whole online journey.

In this episode, Jean-Christophe shares his approach to merging brands while minimizing friction and negative impact. He also discusses the future of SEO and how they are experimenting with influencing LLMs.

Key Takeaways:

• The future of SEO may shift to thinking about how to influence LLMs, and what they say about your brand. While it’s currently unclear how to do this, it will likely become increasingly important in the coming years.
• When merging multiple brands, move slowly and very carefully monitor your work to look for friction and negative impacts.
• Investing in the martech stack is uncuttable since data is essential to the modern marketer.

Quote:

• We did two major acquisitions in the last two years, and we had three websites under three brands. So we are going through this major rebranding, combining and merging the three brands and phasing out two of the three brands. And so I would say that's a massive project and experiment too. It's like, how do you merge these brands and which have followers, minimizing the business impact, minimizing customer friction? Break things along the journey, so you have to take things. So this, you can identify what you bring to customer journeys or customer flow you're breaking. And as you shift the traffic, for example, SEO, as you start to rebuild SEO, it takes time. Paid search, you cannot do it all. So we said the main learnings are, we knew that would be things breaking and it's happening. So take it slowly, monitor, monitor, monitor very quickly. And we have a weekly committee where we monitor how it's going and the transition is happening. So yes, be slow and patient. Don't break things, or as little as possible.

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:04) The Trust Tree: Useful organizational design structures

*(08:57) The Playbook: Influencing LLMs

*(31:51) The Dust Up The challenge of monetization

*(33:54) Quick Hits: JCP’s quick hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jean-Christophe on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Contentsquare
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Drew Chapin, CMO at Certinia, a platform that connects all aspects of services operations, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting.

In this episode, Drew discusses monitoring buying signals and generating the right traffic to your website. He also dives into inheriting a rebrand and some of the nuances of marketing in a private equity owned company.

Key Takeaways:

•  Cold calls, cold emails and the days of expecting someone to fill out a form to get content are over. B2B marketers need to stop making friction or blockers.
• Nothing fails like success. If you just continue to execute what has worked in the past, you're going to miss innovation opportunities.
• Aspire for a champagne flute funnel over a martini glass funnel. Maybe not as many leads are coming in at the top, but they are higher quality and converting and much higher rates through the funnel.

Quote:

• “85 percent of the time the buyer will go with the first vendor that they contact. So, building that trust with the buyer over time is critically important. And so, you know, in the old days, you put a form in front of every piece of content and we would optimize around the contact information. And then you'd pass that along to some BDR and they would just be banging their head against the wall, calling people who weren't on the buying committee. They weren't ready to talk to a salesperson, you know, and it just was waste so much waste. And so what we're trying to do now is we're trying to monitor the activity at the target account level and look for buying signals”

Episode Timestamps:

*(02:51) The Trust Tree: Stretching the dollar in a PE-owned company

*(06:28) The Playbook: Generating quality traffic to the website

*(24:28) The Dust Up: Proving ROI to the board

*(26:59) Quick Hits: Drew’s quit hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/
• Connect with Drew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapindrew/
• Learn more about Certinia: https://www.linkedin.com/company/certinia/
• Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/