218. How can small businesses leverage B2B marketing tactics for success? (f. Carey Thiels)
Wondering if B2B marketing strategies are relevant for your small business? ⚾️ Join us as we chat with Carey Thiels, a B2B marketing consultant, about adapting big-league tactics to scale effectively. Get ready to discover how short-form content can make a significant impact in today's evolving media landscape.
Episode transcription
Phil
Think B2B marketing strategies don't apply to your small business? Think again. Today, we are joined by Keri Thiels, a B2B marketing consultant and a past client of ours. She's the best. You're going to find that out for yourself in a second.
lauren
In this episode, Keri reveals how small businesses can adapt big league marketing strategies to scale effectively and make a significant impact.
Phil
Are you ready to learn from the best? Here we go.
carey
I just said, oh my God, look how affish you are with this microphone. It's amazing. Thank you.
phil
This is my favorite comment that we get from guests. Because we actually have the same microphone, but I put a lot of energy into making sure mine is hidden. And Lauren's setup is very 1994.
lauren
It's like a skyscraper in front of my face.
phil
It's like a local radio station vibe.
carey
I was just thinking local radio, yep.
phil
Lauren's ready to give us the weather report, and I am here for it.
lauren
Every time we record this podcast, I feel like such a frickin douchebag. I can't even tell you. And this thing, this clunky thing.
As soon as we're done recording, because I can't disassemble it. It's like really complex. It's got like arms and then I have to move it behind my computer and I have to be super careful with that thing on. And the other thing, too, is my previous computer, this stupid microphone with these pointy little angles.
Completely scratched up the back of my computer. It like vandalized my property. This thing, I, I despise this microphone. Most people have these cute little lapel things that they hook on or ones that are out of sight, out of mind. Phil makes me use this mortifying, mortifying piece of mechanical equipment, and it takes up so much space in my peaceful office.
Anyway, thank you for the compliment, Carey, but it was not received.
carey
Oh my god, I have missed you guys so much. This banter is amazing. I love it. Also, can we discuss really quickly, Lauren is, I think, crushing it. Oh my god. Don't think I haven't finished your everyday posting on LinkedIn, because I have, and it is the best. Fire. And also, I feel like all of your ideas, by the way.
lauren
Thank you. People must be so sick of it. I'm trying to crack the nut of LinkedIn.
phil
You did go from zero to a hundred.
carey
Yeah, she was a Google on LinkedIn when we were working together.
phil
And now she's like I get push notifications. Lauren has posted on TikTok.
I open TikTok once a month and I get 50 posts in a row from Lauren. And that was fine. That was TikTok. Now I go to LinkedIn. And I am pummeled, pummeled.
lauren
Assaulted from all sides.
Carey
Yes, and I love it. I am here for it, Lauren. Weak feelings. I'm telling you what, like, our audiences are totally different and, you know, imitation is the highest form of flattery.
And I am like, bookmark, bookmark, bookmark. Yes, ma'am. Thank you.
lauren
LinkedIn is such a weird platform. I don't know if you find this, but. Some days my post will be seen by thousands and other days it's only shown to like a hundred people. It's like the algorithm's all over the place. I can't figure it out.
carey
I just said Wicked, because I was trying to say I think LinkedIn is wicked.
Like, I can't curse on a podcast, but like, it's just like wicked in like old school. I work in LinkedIn. Every single day. And the campaign manager is antiquated. The way Paul metrics is antiquated. The LinkedIn people are going to come after me. I don't care, but it's antiquated and their algo is so antiquated tool. I feel like, because it also can't grow like the way that even their hashtags work and stuff, like as much content as you and I and everyone else, both followership should be through the roof for accounts like mine is stuck. And I post like five days a week. So, I don't know. I hear you. It's crazy. Yeah.
lauren
Not my favorite, but I do take the, I guess, thought leadership of people like Gary Vee seriously. And he says like, LinkedIn is one of the few social platforms that you can really, really take off on right now. And so I just figure I don't know. Why not? Why not try to figure it out?
carey
You gotta tell me, because I'm posting stuff too, but I have found, I know when we were working together on my LinkedIn during the brand project, you were always encouraging me that the most vulnerable posts were the one that did the best.
Yeah. And honestly, like, That's where I'm headed, because the really in depth stuff that I post about, like, that my B2B knowledge doesn't do nearly as well as, like, the more personal types of things, which is such a conundrum for LinkedIn, because it's supposed to be, like, so pro, you know?
phil
Yeah. Well, this actually brings us to the topic, but you say it's a conundrum.
Don't you think it's interesting, and don't you think it's topical for B2B? Are we bored of business content? I mean, I don't particularly get excited to open LinkedIn, but I like opening LinkedIn and reading about things that are not businessy.
carey
Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I'm coaching clients to think that way, too.
So I'm on a hill right now with all of my clients, which is. We have to think like consumers in B2B marketing and do what consumer marketing is doing. And B2B is so far behind because we're still doing long form content like white papers and blog posts for SEO when things like generative AI are taking over and the search algorithms are changing now and consumers are consuming TikTok videos that are less than six seconds long.
We as consumers are changing in the way that we consume media. And B2B hasn't caught up with that yet. And I don't understand it. People ask me all the time, oh, is, is TikTok going to blow up for B2B anytime soon? I don't know, but I want to be there when it does, or if it does. So like, let's get on board with short form content businesses, because that's the way of the world right now.
And the way people are actually consuming media.
phil
I love that. I remember in the middle of your branding project thinking, I can't wait to have a podcast interview with you because your perspectives are so interesting and you're definitely one of those clients for Lauren and I where we felt like we almost feel guilty because not guilty, but like, cause we did really good in depth work together, but like guilty in a sense that we learned so much from you.
We have some of those clients where we get a front row seat into your world, into the way you think, into the way you approach and even evolve. I think even your perspectives are always evolving, right? You're very tuned into like what's now and what's next. And so I feel like you're really good at sharing and putting into words, those things that are working now that are not working now.
So what do we try? And I just, yeah, we learned so much of that in our project.
carey
I learned so much from you and I'm not just saying that literally when I tell you, I follow you guys and watch what you're doing on the consumer side of things. And like. Try and do, bring, incorporate some of that into what I'm doing with clients and what I'm doing from a personal branding perspective too.
You guys are so much more than what appears on the surface. Working with you guys is fantastic. Cause it led me to be more curious about the consumer space and how to pull that into B2B.
phil
What are the things that you are thinking about right now for B2B?
carey
Yeah. So what we just talked about is number one, how to make B2B more accessible, digestible, consumable. Right now we're at this sort of precipice because. B2B and demand generation from like 2000, you know, demand generation is a term that was coined by vendors, just like account based marketing, right? And that happened right around 2000 with Eloqua and Marketo creating this sort of category of what they did with marketing automation tools, right?
Those marketing automation tools, you remember when forms just hit the scene, I know all of us were babies. I mean, we barely like we're walking at that point, right? So. We don't really remember, but we can read about it. And so forums kind of hit the scene and customizing, you know, gathering information when someone was interested, was available to marketers.
And now that's been done so much and we've come so far in 20 some odd years, that it's not so much about collecting someone's information anymore. It's about like, who cares if we can collect your information, cause we can pretty much follow you around the internet and see what you're doing and what you're intending to purchase.
Even with the death of the cookie, we'll still be able to do that. And so now we're at this precipice of like, people are still thinking about demand gen and how do we get leads in the door and collect someone's information. When we should be turning the corner and thinking like, well, it doesn't matter who they are.
Because when they want to buy something, they're going to raise their hand and say, Hey, I really want to buy this piece of software. So what we should be focusing on is telling that, getting back to the brand story. Making people actually feel something with their marketing instead of like the almighty lead capture.
We need to focus more on how to actually connect with consumers and tell a brand story of why we're going to make their work life better, right? So that's kind of the big thing that I'm focused on right now. Of course, you know, there's all the other things like, Is content marketing going to die because of AI?
Well, no. No, it's not, but we have to change with the times, right? And I like to view AI as a helper tool. I use it every single day chatGPT is always open on my desktop because I use it to do like start an email for me or whatever. It takes the mundane crap that we have to do and does it for us. And then, you know, it's so much easier to edit something than it is to like come up with it from scratch or use something.
phil
You need an example of like something you would type into chat. GPT don't even overthink it. Just like if you had it open right now, what would you type? I just love to hear what people are typing into it.
carey
I would probably do something like write a follow up email about, you know, Something that I'm talking to a client about and it literally spits it out for me. The more specific I am, obviously, the better prompts it gives me. Or like, I can use it to remind me about B2B topics that are hot in 2024 that I want to have my opinion on on Lauren and Phil's podcast. Stuff like that.
phil
Love it.
lauren
I freaking love chatGpT. I talk with ChatGPT more than anyone else in my life.
carey
Yeah. You do. I do. That's so funny. Yeah. I totally do. It's always open. And I literally did do that. I literally was like, give me 10 2024 B2B topics. that are hot right now. I forget what I said. But then it spits all these things out. And then am I going to take them from chat GPT and spit them to you? No, but I have an opinion about all those things.
So it's just reminding me.
phil
Can I give people a little tip? There's this amazing plugin for Chrome called text blaze. Anytime I type something twice into chat GPT, I just did it. I don't know if you heard a sound effect. It wasn't me not paying attention, but it was me shortening a text snippet in TextBlaze, which is a free Google Chrome extension that saves your text snippets.
Perfect for proms. So anytime you find yourself typing something more than once, I have a little icon in Chrome and I just, boop, I click it, type the name of the snippet and then the shortcode, I always do a backslash and then almost like a link just in my mind, almost like Slack, like just in my mind when I'm trying to call it up.
And it works when you're writing emails, it works in chat GPT, it's called Text Blaze and it just reminded me to mention this because you're going there and you're typing things, so I say to people, anytime you type something more than once, you're Save it as a snippet and you can do really advanced things like I could copy a YouTube video title.
Okay, copy it then I type the command And I can have that title pasted into the snippet already. So copy my YouTube title. So I have one that's like, if I want to boost a YouTube video, I can copy the YouTube video and then write my snippet. And I have a section in my snippet where it's insert previously copied text, for example.
I'm a nerd for this stuff. And it just popped in my mind and I just used it 30 seconds ago. So I was like, Oh, we have to just mention this tool. Cause it's. It's one of the cool, like, AI complement tools. It's not actually AI, but it lives within the AI world really well.
carey
I love it. Do you know the other thing that's getting really cool in terms of AI is, like, all the video editing and creation tools? Like, Did you guys know SEMrush has this tool that you can literally like pop a blog post URL into and it creates an animated video for you? Like what? Really? It's awesome.
And it may not be like the best thing ever, but it's something. Like so many B2B clients are like still stuck in the like, I can't do video kind of a thing. These tools are making it really like super accessible to make video. I mean, I deal in LinkedIn ads. All day, every day, right? Like every client I have has LinkedIn ads.
LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B marketing. Okay, great. But LinkedIn is hungry for new content all the time. And you constantly have to be feeding the beast for it to work for you. I mean, even when you start a campaign, it tells you like, you need five rotation, five pieces of this creative in order for algorithms to rotate it properly and you get a 20 percent increase on your impression share if you do, la la la.
So, it eats content like candy. And so, using tools like this to kind of like streamline the video creation process. It's amazing. Like Canva, for example, create an animation in Canva that's three seconds long and LinkedIn looks at it as, oh, it's an mp4, it's a video, great. And you can run it as a video ad that's going to get you way more impressions than a static image.
So, AI, thank you.
lauren
Are your clients open to AI?
carey
Yeah. Of course, there's like. Things floating around, uh, you know, I have a public company and the public company is like, we need to make sure that our AI tools are safe and secure and that we're not jeopardizing any security or introducing security risks.
Okay. Get it. Totally fine. Your series Bs are like, yeah, whatever, bring it on. Oh, yeah. I love that. Yeah. Like people are afraid of it. I think it's making things great. So much easier. So I love it.
phil
There is a blog post on the internet listener that you should Google called beyond the hype five early adopter creators reflect on the future of generative AI.
It is on the official Adobe. And it features five speakers, of which I am included, from Adobe Max last year. They asked me to reflect on the impact of AI in my business, and this was October of last year. And I tell this story, I continue to tell this story. Carey, you've been in every keynote that I've delivered since October 2023 because I tell the story about your photo shoot.
We loved the photos. We didn't love how the red brick photographed. And it was the same day that Generative Phil launched in Photoshop. So all my creator peer friends are like, look at this cool technology. And then I have Carey saying, I'm not crazy about the red brick. And I thought, wait a second, rather than having to send you for a reshoot, pay the photographer more, spend more time and resources and energy, what if I was able to just change the background to something that felt more on brand and I spent maybe 10 15 minutes sent you a few options and the image that we chose is on the homepage of your website. And I tell that story often and I told that story for the first time at Adobe Max and it is the segment that they included in that blog post.
There's a little video of it. It's very cool.
carey
Oh my god Phil, I'm famous.
phil
Well, you're coming with me, baby. You're coming with me.
carey
Um, I'm very proud of that. We were handing it on like, Oh, I don't like this color, but the picture is really good. You know, photo shoots are not cheap. So you're a genius. It was amazing.
phil
And I was like, yes, love it. Homepage photo done. You would never guess that it's AI. Yeah. You'd never guess. And even technology has even evolved generative AI for image creation and now text prompt to video is like the rage at the time that we're recording this. I talked about on the news last week in New York.
It was the first instance in my business that AI made a difference. It was the first instance. I had been distracted for three to four months before that about all the exciting gimmicky tools. But when you ask me what was the first moment that AI made your life better, made your life easier, impacted your business in a positive way, that's the story.
Carey
I love it. You're a genius.
phil
Oh, I don't know if I'm a genius. I did just have a good day and connect the dots that morning and thought, huh, I don't know if this is going to work, but let's try it. And actually, isn't it true that so many things in business are like, they start as little experiments or side thoughts? Even in our branding process, Lauren, we'll be like, the designer might do something that we didn't ask for and then they do it and we're like, oh, is that a mistake or is that genius? It's kind of, so many ideas are born from that.
carey
I know. It's like, I put something out to my network last week, maybe, and I was basically pining for human interaction because I am a freelancer, consultant, strategist, whatever you say.
I work from home and I don't work for a company. I love my clients. I have great interactions with them and have a lot of friends at clients, but I miss the camaraderie of being in an office. And so I just kind of like one day on a whim last week was like, I want to see if other marketing freelancers want to be in a community.
Let's do it. And the response for my little LinkedIn profile was overwhelming. And now I have the guts of the freelance marketer hub built and I'm about to launch it.
lauren
That's so awesome. So awesome. I feel like you two, Phil and Keri, have that in common where you both are very, very open and comfortable with experimenting just to see how something turns out.
And I think that's like a very valuable quality, especially in an entrepreneur. Is your You're willing to tell yourself, okay, I'm just going to try this and see what happens. And I love that.
carey
Yeah. It's funny, like a lot of different pieces have kind of been falling into place in this week talking about like doing a freelance community.
I recently just saw, I don't know if this was like placed on TikTok for me because of like what I've been thinking or what, but I just saw this TikTok post or reel about this trend that's going around of company retreats, but it's friend groups doing it. And I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing. Because I want to do a company retreat for the freelance marketer hub.
And like, even though we don't have a company, like apparently it's like blowing up on Tik ToK. Have you guys heard about this?
lauren
I haven't seen the friend retreats, but I love that. I have seen when friends will get together and do PowerPoint presentations for each other on different topics, and it can be whatever they want.
And one of them did an overview of their workplace and did photos of like who their enemies were and why. Another person did an argument about why the Twilight movies are incredible and like when you do your freelance retreat, you should absolutely have a PowerPoint session as part of that.
carey
This woman put together a friend group retreat that she called her like company retreat And she had a PowerPoint deck, they did like a dinner out together, like it was hilarious.
So I'll definitely have to share it with you. My husband actually does PowerPoint presentations at home as a joke, because every year we want to know if our oil bill has gone up or down, and so it's going to be just like these comprehensive presentations that me. My four year old and my two year old have to sit through every year.
That is hilarious. And it's like, and it's like corporate speak and everything like, well, the meeting folks, please hold your questions till the end or put them in the chat. And of course, my four and my two year old are like, what is going on? They're like, can I get back to my Du Bois now?
Exactly. But no, they have to sit through the meeting. It's legit. Oh, that's so funny.
lauren
Okay, I have a B2B question for you. I'm so curious to hear your thoughts, and this is actually something that just came up with a client, but it's just something that, that, where this light bulb went off in my mind, and I was like, I should ask Carey about this when we speak with her this week.
Okay, I'm ready. I hope I have a good answer. So, we have a client. I wrote copy for a sales page ish thing on their website talking about a service. It was for individuals who work in business and the client's feedback was, this feels more B2C. We want this to feel more B to B. And the question that I have in my mind for you is, do you feel like there's a difference between writing copy for B2C versus B2B?
And the reason I ask is because to me, at the end of the day, the B's are people. People are reading the copy.
carey
So my answer is no. I don't think that there should be any difference in copy. I think that there is, which I think is a miss. It's a missed opportunity, honestly, because The people on the other side reading it are people, they're not businesses, right?
And so I think there's this whole misnomer about B2B copy, B2B marketing campaigns, that it has to be this businessy type of language or business appropriate types of content. And I would encourage people to test the waters. It doesn't, you know, just because your business is, you know, let's say you're in like financial capital management.
Just because that's your business doesn't mean that the people who work at that business, that's all that they do. You're marketing to consumers first. I recently saw something where a marketer, or maybe it was a company was describing business to human instead of business to consumer and business to business.
And I think honestly that the people who can crack through and get to the human aspect of marketing in B2B are going to be the companies that actually win because that stale sort of. Business y speak is gone out the window these days, right? Especially since we're all marketing to consumers. Does that help?
lauren
Yeah, it does. It makes me feel more confident in what my gut feeling was. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, an emotional response of some type needs to be elicited in your messaging because a human is going to be making the decision, in my opinion.
carey
The only thing different about B2B is the buying process. B2C, you can click a button, it's a D2C sale, it's an e com, like, you can make the decision usually pretty quickly, even if it's a big purchase, right? But a B2B purchase, the only difference there is that you have to go through a lot of different people to purchase a software for an enterprise company or even a mid market size company, right?
There's a bunch of different people who have to make that decision. And a bunch of different pain points that B2B marketers are marketing to. We still have to have the same types of insights, the same types of copywriting, the same types of creative processes. It's just we have multiple people to influence for one item to purchase.
Does that make sense?
lauren
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
phil
How do you deal with the timeline of B2B because it makes me want to jump out the window how slow things are and how many people need to weigh in. There have been moments even when I've been paid more for projects because it's business, it's enterprise, it's corporate. But my God, it gets to the point where I'm like, is it even worth it for all this extra money? You're driving me freaking mental.
carey
It's so funny. You're so right. And honestly, when I think about my own client base, I tend to skew towards Series B because there's less people to please. You know, not from a buying process standpoint, but because like when I work myself with these Series B clients, there aren't as many chiefs.
So yes, you're right, it can be totally grueling. Sales people would say the same thing, like, what do you mean I have to go talk to the guy in procurement to get this software approved even though this team wants to buy it? You know, like, what do you mean I have to go talk to the HR person who has nothing to do with this security software sale?
So I think there are a lot of people that feel your frustration and they're angry because software and tech sales is really lucrative. And there's so much more money to be made sort of in the B2B tech world. But you're right, the sales process is grueling, which is why in B2B marketing, the buying process sort of dictates a lot.
Like I said, it's why B2B is so different than B2C is because that process is so long and there are different touch points in marketing, which you have to take advantage of. If somebody's doing research, sort of at the top of the funnel, if you will, and somebody else is looking at case studies down here and is already in an opportunity and talking to several different vendors about the software they want to buy, then there's different opportunities for different messaging.
So not only do you have to layer on all those personas that you have to influence, the place in their buying cycle where they are too. It's nuts. There's a lot of different moving parts and pieces to it. But if you can stop it there, it's a good spot to be.
phil
You created balance for yourself by having the variety of the series B and then the corporate stuff so that it keeps it fresh and interesting.
I get bored. That's why I can't work in house. I found the perfect job for me and it's Being curious all the time. I mean, Lauren uncovered that for me in our brand project.
lauren
Cause you took StrengthsFinders as well. Wasn't it?
carey
And yeah, I can't be stuck doing the same thing. And especially in B2B when there's such a long sales cycle and you're working on the same product, you know, it keeps it fresh and interesting for me to be in this freelance role where I get to work with lots of different clients.
phil
Yeah, I get that. What advice or what learning moments. Exists for small business owners from the corporate world. Someone who hasn't experienced corporate or isn't in that space. Are there things that you've learned or leverage from the corporate world that, that small business owners can implement or think about?
carey
The lesson that small business owners can take away from the corporate world is don't wish you were in it because honestly, I'm serious. Small business owners have the advantage of being fast, being able to try things, being able to experiment. Like, think about us as entrepreneurs. We can do whatever we want in terms of testing out new things.
Minimum viable products, right? Like I can put out on my LinkedIn that I want to build a community and see if people respond. I can build that community and then people can give me their feedback, you know, on what they want to see, whether or not they want to pay what content they want, corporate and enterprise level companies don't have that luxury.
It takes weeks, if not months to get a new idea to market. And you have to go through an entire bureaucracy of people to get that idea approved. And so the biggest lesson for me is, Hey, I get to do what I want. I'm nimble. I'm fast. I'm trying to think of other things that I would say.
phil
I do love that answer. So don't feel like you need to say more because I think that's a great answer.
carey
Yeah, I just, I think people all the time wish they were bigger than they are. And I think, well, I love being small. I think once you're a small business owner and entrepreneur and in the kind of way that we are, And we kind of thrive off of that energy of being able to do new and different things whenever we have a new idea, right?
And so I've always kind of said like enterprise and corporate is not for me, which is why I only have really one enterprise client because like, be thankful, the slide decks, the bureaucracy, the changing of the narrative, like, ugh. I hate it.
lauren
Or what, what drives me mental, and this is as someone who, out of my top 34 strengths on StrengthsFinder, my number 34, the bottom of the barrel, is adaptability.
I'm not joking. It drives me to drink. Like, not in like a dangerous way, but it definitely makes me want to pour a glass of wine. When we're like almost done with a project, like we're so close, we're almost there, and then someone from another department just weighs in with feedback and it flips us, like it completely brings us back to the beginning, it drives me mental.
carey
Can you imagine spending your entire day trying to build a slide to sell your idea to someone one step above you, two steps above you? Like, it's just grueling. I hate it.
phil
You said something that I think is really important. I think it's the vibe of this year, which is like we as entrepreneurs, small business owners, we want to grow.
I've created social media content about the difference between growth and scale. I think what we actually want to do is scale, but what we don't want to do is overcomplicate. Our lives. There was a quote, Cody Sanchez, who I feel like is the Gary V of 2023 or 24. She said, “complexity makes you seem smart, simplicity makes you money.” It's not a great.
carey
Oh my God, I love that.
phil
But that's the vibe. It's like, how can we have simpler businesses? And let's not strive for like, complication. It's not necessarily the answer.
carey
I love that, Phil. That could be my like, this year's motto, I swear. The complexity, I think that, that always, complexity comes because people are trying to seem really smart and like they have it all together.
And it's actually, the smarter you are, the more you simplify. Yes. That's so good. I love it.
phil
Where can we send people to get more of you?
cafrey
I'll send you a link to the Freelance Marketer Hub. And you can find me on LinkedIn at my website. First and last name, or you can find me on TikTok because Lauren inspired me to start a TikTok when we were working together and trying to grow it.
And people can go to your website Obviously, my website, yes. careythiels.com that Phil and Lauren put together for me and it's beautiful.
phil
Beautiful. Thank you so much for hanging out with us on Brand Therapy.
carey
I love you guys anytime whatsoever.
lauren
We love you too.
