Welcome Read: Yeah, I definitely think there are some situations where this doesn’t apply. The most glaring one is more B2C-focused. A simple way to look at it: B2C is short-form and B2B is long-form, in terms of how you actually convert people. When you’re thinking about a simpler product, a simpler solution to a simpler problem — for example, an AI study aid or something like that, that’s free to use or has a five-dollar-a-month subscription — that’s something you can explain in a short-form video. I still think you want to go content-first, but it’s just not going to be as educational, because you’re not really solving a complex problem. You can explain it in a 30-second video: “Hey, are you having trouble studying? Do you have a test due the next day and need some quick, easy studying tools? Here’s something.” That could be a TikTok or something like that. That’s a pretty glaring difference in go-to-market that you’d want to consider. This is really applicable for a lot of different service businesses, as well as educational businesses. If you’re selling courses, this is obviously the way to do it, because you want to give this value up front — it’s so much easier to get people to buy from you if they actually trust you and they’ve gotten value from you in the past. That’s the whole point of a lead magnet: to give people some value up front so they can trust the underlying methodologies your business and your software are built on. It reduces so much friction in the sales process, because you’re not trying to sell cold.
Mario Neto: You said B2C short, B2B long, but also B2C more volume — and I think B2B is depth. I was going to say quality, but I think both need quality; quality is very generic. But for B2B it’s depth, because as you mentioned, you’ve got to be more educational. Sometimes most of that ninety-five percent don’t even know they have the problem — they don’t even know they need a solution for a problem they don’t know they have. So for B2B you need to be educational, go in depth, get into the root causes, and convince them.
Welcome Read: I think that’s a good point — B2C is volume and B2B is depth, and it’s true. If you look at a B2C company, someone selling e-commerce products like comfy hoodies, if you look at their TikTok or any of their social profiles, those people are posting thousands of posts a year. A lot of it is outsourced — they’re working with influencers and really trying to do that UGC style. But it just goes to show that if you look at the largest B2B platforms, they’re just not at that volume. Many of them are thought leaders in their spaces — if you look at Salesforce, they literally run events trying to teach salespeople better techniques. You also bring up a good point about relationships. One of the best things about long-form content is that you can emulate the relationship you’d have in person. If you’re a salesperson, or an expert in your field, and you go to an in-person event and have these long-form conversations that get people adopted into your methodologies and the way you think about things, then when you’re at that in-person event it’s going to be much easier to book a follow-up meeting and say, “hey, you really liked this, do you want to talk about it again?” People will be chomping at the bit for that, especially if you’re speaking on stage. So I think it’s a really powerful tool to help build up relationships in your industry.
It’s also important to note that I like to break demand creation into three main steps: offer, content, and distribution. Offer is the way you try to engage them in your sales process. Content is the long-term content itself. Distribution is how you get people to see the content that has your offer within it. That’s where you can take some notes from the B2C playbook — that’s where repurposing comes into play. You can have this long-form content that’s your conversion lever to turn strangers into sales conversations, but you can also use that B2C playbook of repurposing and posting a large volume of content on your social profiles to link back to the source pillar content and drive traffic and eyes to that.
Mario Neto: Also, one thing — if you have all that content that you repurposed from the original main source, it’s easier to test channels, because not every B2B business has its audience on the same channel. You could have a B2B business where the audience is a little younger and more interested in TikTok, or you could have a B2B business where everyone is more traditional, a little older, and you’re talking about gray hairs on Facebook. You need to test those channels, and if you have a lot of content, you can test different formats across different channels and see what works best. And hey, maybe you find you need to be on LinkedIn.
Welcome Read: Yeah, essentially every single purchasing decision in the modern era is a multi-touch purchase decision. Someone’s going to look at a social profile, look at a review site, look at your website, join a webinar, join your newsletter — they have all these different touchpoints. If you’re relying on just one, you’re going to be in trouble, because you don’t have the same visibility and distribution as you would otherwise. A lot of people say they want to build a brand, be known in the industry, and when a lot of people think that, they immediately default to “I want billboards in the airport, ads in magazines, ads on TV, I want to be on YouTube” — they want to be everywhere. But you don’t just want to think about it from an ads perspective, you also want to think about it from a content perspective, in the sense that it’s much easier to build a brand and a relationship with the market, because that’s really what a brand is: what does the market think about you, what’s the first thing that pops into their head. It’s much easier to do that if you’re creating content that they actually want to consume, not just forced to consume. So instead of promoting ads that are a static image of your product saying how amazing and great it is and the results people have gotten, you create ads that give before they take — value-first — and that’s going to help you build that brand much faster, because you’re promoting content that people want to actively consume.