Quote of the Show

It's not that everything has to happen on your property, but we have to have an active strategy in all these rented channels. But it's no longer just about vanity metrics of driving followership and engagement. It's fundamentally about de-platforming that audience into an owned audience of subscribers.

Key Takeaways

• The way we consume content is constantly changing
• Being where your audience is critical
• The algorithms used in platforms are designed to throttle your reach based on the interests of that platform and not your own.
• Search marketing is only second to building an owned content strategy or an owned audience
• Put yourself out there, build authentic relationships at scale, and don’t worry too much about competitors

Transcript

Jared Robin: Hey, everybody! I’m really excited to welcome you back to Revenue Today. Today, we have a special guest, Anthony Kennada, who is a multiple-time chief marketing officer for various unicorns and now the CEO of a soon-to-be unicorn or maybe in a couple of years, Audience Plus.

Nice to have you with us today, Anthony. Thanks for being here. I’m thrilled about what you’re building. Your startup is one of the few I’m genuinely excited about because it’s reimagining the go-to-market approach. One interesting aspect is your controversial take on content marketing. Can you tell us more about it?

Anthony Kennada: Certainly! Thanks for having me. Traditionally, content marketing in B2B has been focused on creating content for algorithms and search engines to rank our blog posts, often at the expense of what humans actually want to read. The focus was on SEO, driving qualified traffic to our sites, and generating inbound leads. However, the way people consume content is changing. They are listening to podcasts, watching short-form videos, and engaging in live streams on platforms like LinkedIn. We need to evolve our marketing approach to create content that appeals to humans, not just algorithms.

Jared Robin: How did you come to this conclusion?

Anthony Kennada: I wasn’t classically trained as a marketer. When I became the head of marketing at GainSight, I had to figure it out from first principles. We focused on serving our audience of customer success professionals and created content to help them do their jobs better. We also involved members of our community in creating and sharing content on our blog. By building thought leadership, facilitating best practice exchanges, and serving our audience, we found that it not only helped people but also drove demand and impacted the business positively.

Jared Robin: It sounds like a unique approach. How do you see this idea evolving in the future?

Anthony Kennada: The key is to be where our audience is, actively engaging with them on various platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, or others. Instead of just focusing on vanity metrics like followers and engagements, we should be working towards converting our audience into subscribers of our owned content. By adopting an approach similar to consumer media companies, where they leverage short-form clips and podcasts to drive subscribers to their owned audience, we can tell a clearer story on how engagement drives revenue.

Jared Robin: So, you’re advocating for a shift in marketing strategy towards building an owned audience and leveraging content to create more meaningful connections?

Anthony Kennada: Exactly! We need to move beyond just pushing content and start building an audience through collaborative efforts. This way, we can involve our audience in shaping our industry’s future and create a powerful network that drives growth and impact. Content should be a means to foster relationships, create value, and serve our audience better, ultimately leading to revenue generation.

Indeed, it’s about collaborating with our audience and curating content that provides value to them. It’s exciting to see how this approach can transform the marketing landscape.

Anthony Kennada: Everyone’s got their own mission that they’re personally on. Your job is to deliver products that can accelerate that vision, as well as content, events, unity, and a sense of belonging to a broader mission. It helps people along in their journey.

Investing in brand, thought leadership, and owned media helps serve people on their journey and careers. Building relationships with teams, partners, and board members is crucial for success. It’s about maintaining those relationships and paying it forward to others as you advance your own career.

Jared Robin: Let’s talk about Audience Plus. I know it’s not officially launched yet. How are you using it to go to market?

Anthony Kennada: We’re a SaaS company operating in pseudo stealth mode, building an audience around the idea of owned media through creating various content, events, and podcasts. We aim to launch our products in the spring, and it’s been a series of happy accidents that led us to this strategy. I used to advocate for category creation, but now I think it’s not necessary for every company. Building an audience around your unique point of view can be more effective and powerful.

Jared Robin: Category creation requires evangelizing a problem to justify your product’s existence. Owned media helps bridge the gap between the brand on social and the website, providing a more compelling reason for visitors to subscribe.

Anthony Kennada: Audience engagement is a better metric than MQL for measuring success. By building an owned audience and focusing on engagement, you can better connect it to pipeline creation and revenue. Dark social and dark funnel are important, but it’s crucial to lead with value and focus on building authentic relationships through content media.

Jared Robin: Yes, the idea is to give people a compelling reason to subscribe and reveal themselves. Let them belong to a movement or community, and the conversion rate can be much higher.

Anthony Kennada: Building in public and being open about your journey can also help establish thought leadership and build brand equity, benefiting your go-to-market strategy. Category creation can be beneficial for some companies, but building an audience around your unique point of view can also be an effective approach, especially for those with a clear path to disrupting an existing market.

Jared Robin: Thank you, friends, for joining me. This has been another great episode of Revenue Today. For more episodes or show notes, visit RevGenius.com. If you’re in the RevGenius community, reach out to me with any feedback or ideas for future podcasts in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you’re not a part of RevGenius yet, join us at RevGenius.com for a free and fast sign-up. We have something for all levels of revenue professionals.

For senior leaders, we just launched RevRoom, a private community for collaboration on the future B2B go-to-market. It can get lonely out there, and we’ve built a tight-knit group of senior leaders. I’m looking forward to seeing you all there. Thank you again for listening, and I hope to connect with you soon.