CMOs: Embracing B2C Strategies for More B2B Success

Brandon Rhoten, the current CMO of GroundTruth, leverages his rich B2C experience acquired during his time at Wendy’s and as the CMO at Papa John’s and Potbelly Sandwiches.

Brandon Rhoten, the current CMO of GroundTruth, leverages his rich B2C experience acquired during his time at Wendy’s and as the CMO at Papa Johns and Potbelly Sandwiches. In this exclusive interview, discover his unique method of merging B2C and B2B marketing that includes but goes much deeper than grabbing more attention and connecting with the emotional needs of B2B buyers. Explore Brandon’s unique fusion of B2C and B2B tactics to fuel innovation at GroundTruth.

After listening for years to the likes of Forbes, Gartner, and Oracle about making B2B more like B2C, it is more than just an interesting notion.

Brandon Rhoten, CMO @ GroundTruth – Follow Brandon on LinkedIn

“You’re advertising to people in B2B, and they have the same attention issues and fundamental desires as in B2C.” – Brandon Rhoten

According to Brandon, the key to grabbing attention in B2B marketing is finding the “hook” – the one thing that solves the problem and gets the target audience interested. It’s all about addressing their fundamental needs quickly. This is the opposite of leading with function and features.

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube.

Introduction to Brandon Rhoten

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the B2B Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And today, we have an incredible opportunity to talk to Brandon Rhoten, who is the CMO of GroundTruth. Now, part of the background here is what makes this conversation so interesting, and that’s Brandon has had an extensive B2C background at Wendy’s, the CMO of Papa Johns, and went on to be the CMO of Potbelly Sandwiches and was brought into GroundTruth as the CMO to bring more B2C to B2B. So with that, Brandon, I’m going to let you maybe give a little bit more on your background on why you were brought into GroundTruth, and what you’re doing.

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah, well, thanks for having me, Steve. I appreciate it. Yeah, so I kind of started in the marketing world on the agency side, actually a B2B agency. Now, it’s called Merkle B2B. At the time, it was Gyro HSR. There we did a lot of work for B2B companies that was much more about grabbing attention, more so than typical B2B stuff, even though there was a lot of thought leadership and sort of long-term B2B efforts.

But at the end of the day, that’s kind of where I got the taste for marketing and learned the ropes. Somehow Wendy’s found me and asked me to come build their digital social program. So I did that, and that did really well. So Wendy’s kept giving me stuff to do. Ultimately I ran all advertising, media, external, creative, anything brand, anything consumer-facing for Wendy’s for about six years and had some great success there as we helped turn that brand around and then ultimately get it kind of known for its digital and social marketing especially and overall it’s rebranding efforts.

That led me to become CMO at Papa Johns where we reworked all their media, reworked their creative approach, and built a team there to do that work. And then went to Potbelly where I had a totally different challenge.

There we had to rebuild the menu, rebuild pricing structure, rebuild basic brand elements to make that brand start growing again as well. And through all that, really didn’t intend to be in B2C or B2B, but had worked with many great partners, and one of them was GroundTruth.

And GroundTruth is a real-world behavior into marketing company, uses location, purchase data, things like that to help build out mediums. And GroundTruth asked me to come help them out, to put a little of that B2C into their B2B world. Obviously they work with a lot of B2C clients, like me previously.

So it was a really good fit and I’m having a blast in the B2B world over the last year-ish.

Steve MacDonald: So we’ve heard of that a lot. The idea of getting more B2C in your B2B is not new. Gartner talks about it. A lot of the analyst firms talk about it. You’ve got this incredible background.

Why you need more B2C in your B2B

Steve MacDonald: You started B2B, worked with a number of different clients, worked heavily, extensively at the highest levels of B2C, and now you’re brought in to do exactly what the analysts are telling us we need to do. If you could just sum up in your own terms why you think B2B needs more B2C. And just put it into terms that we can understand a little bit better.

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah. So I think our CEO at Gyro said it best. His name was Rick Siegel. We had three great founders at that organization, but he used to always say to our B2B firm, we’re advertising to people, and they have the same attention issues. They have the same fundamental desires. They have the same emotional pull to things to get their attention.

So because we’re advertising to people, we use the same techniques as a B2C company does. I really don’t think anyone ever bought, when I was back at my Gyro days, I don’t think anybody bought a machine tool because it was a little bit faster.

At least at first, that’s not what caught their attention about the machine tool or the bearing or the, you named the B2B thing. Our clients sold something beyond that, deeper than that, that actually got them interested in digging into the specs and understanding those details that in theory would get the engineers to agree to buy the thing.

So I think it really boils down to you’re advertising to people and the clutter in B2B is very similar to the clutter in B2C. It just is. I mean, you go through your LinkedIn feed, you go through, if you’re into sort of the niches on Twitter, some other social sites. The clutter is immense.

And everyone is throwing stats, facts, and deep details at you where you don’t even find that hook until you’re a third of the way into the content. And I don’t think that works. So it really boils down to we’re advertising to people in B2B. And they have fundamental needs that can be addressed quickly and get their attention.

Steve MacDonald: It makes just perfect sense, right? You can’t go up and down the LinkedIn feed without getting a little bored, right? And there’s no reason for that. In fact, I’m recording a podcast episode with another CMO later this week, and the title of it is how to steal the attention of your audience in such a good way.

Because content, go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, we were in trade journals and B2B and stuff like that. But now everybody’s got a content team. Everybody’s producing content and we’re vying for the attention. And our buyers are 70% of the way through their research by the time they even want to talk to us.

Real-world studies of what makes a campaign work

Steve MacDonald: So we’ve got to get their attention. We’ve got to get earlier in that buyer’s journey than we have before. I think we’re all bought in on it. Tell me just a little bit about maybe some stories about how you think B2C in B2B has worked well that we can kind of take this basic concept and start putting some kind of meat on the bone there.

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah. So I know it helps a lot to use real-world examples with my team. When I first joined GroundTruth, kind of the opening discussion I had with the marketing team and the sales team and several other teams was essentially, we don’t have to do this the same way everyone else is doing it.

Because in truth, we’ll get the same results they’re getting. The examples I used were consumer examples, but consumer examples that I think were serious pivots from traditional B2B like marketing of technical items to B2C items that had to be attention grabbers. So one example I gave was the Microsoft Zune versus the Apple iPod, those two campaigns.

And if you remember back, and it’s been a really long time, so I’m sure people here, they don’t even know what a Microsoft Zune is. But a Microsoft Zune was Microsoft’s version of the iPod. And it actually came out, I believe, a bit before or about the same time as the Apple iPod, which eventually became the iPhone.

So, the way Microsoft pitched the Zune was, and I think they were teaming up with Dell at the time to do this, so two big companies basically said, it’s got X gigabytes of capacity. It’s this fast. It syncs with this computer. It was a listing. It was a B2B style listing of features, of specs.

And they’re trying to communicate to a public that didn’t really understand any of that stuff. So instead, Apple came out and said, a thousand songs in your pocket. And that made total sense. It was just a simple way to illustrate the same exact information and in a way that the consumers actually found compelling.

So, the iPod took off, and Zune went the way of the dinosaur, I think because of that fundamental approach. They boiled it down to what was the need. And what was a compelling way to express the need so people would pay attention? And then they had the iconic campaign shortly after with the white earbuds and dancing.

And it was just a silhouette in the background, this idea of you’re bringing your music with you, people transitioning from CDs and tape decks and all that stuff. So I think that’s an amazing example that B2B marketers can use to say you don’t need to use the specs. You can use the specs down the touches. Down funnel, somebody is going to be interested in that stuff.

But at the first touch, it’s probably not compelling. I think another from the tech word that I found very useful for my team was Intel. So Intel during the whole battle of speed of processors, a Pentium one, and then a Pentium two, and how much RAM and memory again. It was specs, and it was overwhelming to most consumers.

Well, Intel just said Intel inside. And they had their little mnemonic, the audio mnemonic they had in their ads. And basically, if that stamp was on your computer’s case, it was the most updated processor. You just had to feel good about it. And it was a breakthrough for, I think, home computing.

Because people all of a sudden said, I just need to get something that has Intel inside and I know it will be good. It’s going to be fast. Because again, that extra 10 gigahertz or whatever it was, doesn’t really matter to most consumers. They just want the confidence that if they’re going to go buy a thing, it’s not going to be obsolete in weeks.

So I think that’s another great consumer example. I shared with my team an example of a campaign we did it at Gyro. It was called Down with Dust. It was a drywall company. And basically, when you’re putting up drywall, it’s really dusty and messy. Well, their whole thing was their dust was heavy, so it fell to the ground. So our ad was sitting in Home Depot, sitting in Lowe’s, mostly to contractors, was typical goggles that someone wears while doing contracting work with drywall, and had “down” written on the dust in it. And then this thing below it with this pile of dust on the ground.

And yeah, you could look at that for five minutes if you wanted to read all the specs, but that’s not what got your attention. It was this idea that every drywall contractor knows you’re covered in dust when you’re doing this work and you don’t have to be. So I think there are a lot of great examples that you can use to illustrate to your team that it is very possible to have this conversation in a different way.

You just got to get a little creative with it. And when you get pushback internally from your engineers, your product, people will say, yeah, but you didn’t say this, but you didn’t say this. It’s a process. That first touch, you don’t say everything. You say just what needs to be said to get someone’s attention and get their interest.

Once that happens, you can move them down. You can get them to your microsite, you can get them to your website, you can get them to your brochure, whatever it is that goes deep.

The one thing - the hook

Steve MacDonald: So, two things I’m dying to ask there. One is we got to talk about what it is you say. So if product marketing is huge in B2B, right? Has a very, very defined, important role. But what you’re talking about and getting their attention isn’t product marketing, right? What is it in that message? Getting that attention, from a strategic perspective, what is it that you’re trying to convey if it’s not the specs, it’s not the zoom, gigabyte, and how fast it is or the Pentium one or two in your mind? In the B2B world, we have to get their attention. We’ve got to be creative about it, but what are we trying to convey?

Brandon Rhoten: There’s a lot of names for it. So I won’t go through the litany of synonyms for this thing. I call it the hook. It’s the fundamental thing that solves the problem that the person is trying to solve.

In a B2B context, and I would argue in most B2C contexts, your product or service is designed to fix something. They have an issue, and you’re trying to fix that issue. In some cases, an issue they don’t even know they have. But when they see the problem, they recognize a potential issue for them, and that makes them interested.

But I call it the hook. Some people call it unique selling propositions. I mean again, dozens of synonyms for this thing. But the one thing, and I have some very basic rules when I review creative, and one of them is, what’s the one thing? And it’s got to be one. You can’t have three, you can’t have five. What’s the one thing that’s going to get their attention, solve the problem for the user, get them interested in the conversation, and you can express in a creative, compelling way?

So I think it’s that hook that ultimately grabs somebody’s attention.

Steve MacDonald: It’s like our dust is heavier, right?

Brandon Rhoten: That’s right. That’s the single hook. It is, and down with dust was the way we put it in that particular case. So it is the one thing. I think for the iPod, it’s a thousand songs in your pocket.

It’s you want to carry around all your music with you. That’s the problem. And if you are in the CD world or the tape deck world, that’s impossible. Everybody used to have that giant folder of CDs in their car or tapes or whatever in their car with hundreds of discs. And you just realize eventually that’s inefficient compared to this little thing.

I can stick in my pocket or now this phone that does the same work for me, or now it’s a Spotify that does the work for me without even downloading anything. So boil it down to that singular thing that differentiates your product. And as the category becomes more crowded, the product that you’re trying to sell has more competition.

You’re going to have to change what that thing is potentially. iPod became the monolith in those sorts of systems, but in most cases, like drywall we had dozens of competitors on the shelves. So we had to say, well, what’s that one thing, that one problem that this solves?

Because everybody puts drywall up, and it finishes the house. But what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What is worth the premium you’re going to pay for this drywall mud, which is actually what it was. And we believed, and it worked, that it was the fact that this stuff hit the ground and didn’t cover your whole body with dust.

So I think you have to find that hook and the single thing that differentiates and solves the problem.

Steve MacDonald: And immediately when you said our dust is heavier, I thought I had a visual on my mind that came up of a room just full of dust, almost smoky looking. Right. But then you said it’s heavier. It just, in my mind, it all just fell down. Right.

So the second thing you said was that we have to be more creative in conveying the message here because how it’s said can be as important as what’s said, right? Like the thousand songs in your pocket. After you and I talked this last week, I ran that by one of my 17-year-old sons.

And he’s like, that’s cool that it was very simple. I want all that right here in my pocket. So you had mentioned in there that that message was different, delivered very creatively, right? It had silhouettes of people that were dancing and it was just a very creative message in the B2B world.

Creativity by customer need

Steve MacDonald: What’s your definition, or when you’re saying I’ve got a goal of delivering these messages but more creatively, what does that look like? How do you think about that?

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah. So I think it really boils down to knowing who your target is and what they define as interesting. So it does change category to category and it changes at the part of the funnel you’re at.

The deeper down the funnel, the more likely you’re going to be dealing with somebody who’s more interested in technical things. And therefore, the technical look will be more interesting to them, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. It doesn’t mean it has to be a recitation of dozens of specs.

So I’ll go back to my B2B days to point out an example. One of the companies we represented was called Makino, a machine tool company. This stuff is as industrial as industrial gets. And one of the products they had was a wire cutter. So it’s called an EDM machine and it cuts metal.

Well, a problem when you’re cutting metal is the wire starts to bend out, and it creates what’s called a belly. In the cut, there is a little out group where it’s not straight, where you actually get a little push because that wire naturally pushes out. So we had a campaign, and we took a guy with a huge gut, and he was the guy in the ad, and the whole thing was get rid of your belly.

Again, it’s very simple. It illustrated the point. It was very straightforward. It was very irreverent for the category. The whole category was all just about, again, numbers, saying how fast something went or how straight, how many microns it was accurate. You have time for that stuff after you catch their attention.

And that’s what we actually had to convince the client of. And it didn’t take a whole lot of convincing because the ad was hilarious. And we all did a whole series of ads for a number of years with the same guy, the same belly man that we’re trying to get rid of the belly. So I think you have to boil it down to that one thing.

This is what differentiates this machine from another one. And the machine costs half a million dollars. This is not a minor decision. But you still need their attention before you can pull them in. And you have to think about the target. Well, what does somebody running a machine tool look like? They aren’t a button-down engineer, they’re a worker, a blue-collar worker who thinks that stuff is hilarious because it is hilarious. So when they see that ad, they say to their foreman or the guy who runs the shop or whatever, I’ve had a problem with his belly. If you looked at this Makino machine, because they say they can get rid of the belly, but what caught their attention was this dude who had a big belly and it was get rid of the belly.

So I think you have to know your target, what catches their attention, and then find the interesting hook within that. And it’s going to change industry to industry. Like right now, my company is a media company. We sell media across every device. So CTV and mobile and desktop and all this stuff, all based on location and purchase data and other rural behavior.

So we’re selling to media buyers. Well, what’s interesting to media buyers is different than what’s interesting to creatives at marketing companies. So the stuff we’re talking about are the things they really want. They want ROI, and that can be really boring. So you have to find compelling ways to talk about ROI because that’s what they’re judged by is how many dollars do you make for this company after you invest media dollars?

So that’s the creative we’re building right now and starting to put into the world. It’s all about driving the ROI, but it’s not giant charts. It’s not giant facts. It’s simple. It’s literally you’re wasting your ad dollars. Here’s how to fix it. It’s very straightforward. And we use illustrations of that to drive attention.

It’s not perfect yet, because I’m still building my team. I’m still getting the infrastructure, right? But when you boil it down, you have to say, what is the one thing that they care about, and what is your target? So, will the target care? I mentioned before, one of the things was this idea that you have to have one thing.

Well, the second thing, when I review any piece of creative, is will the target care? And it’s that simple. And if the answer is yes, it’s compelling to the target, it will work. It’s not about you, what you care about. It’s not about what your boss cares about, even though you’ve got to sell it to your boss.

It’s not about what the media agency thinks. It’s will the target care about that piece of creative? And I think you have to find that hook that’s unique to you, that expresses the one thing and clearly makes the target care and pay attention.

Steve MacDonald: There’s something in that I want to ask your opinion on because I spent a lot of my career as well on B2C working with, I was at a top 10 digital agency and we had Nike and Procter and Gamble and Miller Brewing.

The place for emotion in B2B marketing

Steve MacDonald: And one of the things that we always tried to do is latch onto an emotion. And that’s big, emotional selling in the B2C world. In the B2B world, you’re making a big purchase, right? When you’re talking about multimillion-dollar media buys and the ROI, forgetting it or not, investing in a big piece of industrial machinery, the risk factor is big.

So there’s a lot of emotion that’s tied in there. And when you were talking about the ROI you’re wasting, right? You’re wasting money. What hit me was that, like, oh, right. There’s a huge emotional component to that. Is that part of what you judge in terms of more B2C and B2B is tying into the emotions that your buyers care about?

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah, I think it is. And you can create emotion too, right? That’s why when something’s funny, it gets attention. You’re creating a moment of happiness in the actual execution of the creative. So yeah, I think it has to be compelling. And for most people, people don’t make decisions, at least at the beginning of the decision process, based on logic.

They may get on emotions. The joke is that nobody owns a Camry because the Camry actually lasts forever. They own a Camry because they want to be seen in a Camry, and they want to feel like it’s going to last forever. It’s the feeling, it’s the emotions tied to it. So yeah, I think you absolutely have to tap into that either by creating a moment of emotion, like saying you’re wasting your ad dollars, which gives you a little pang. Like, Oh my God, that’s the worst thing you can say to me as a media buyer is that I’m wasting someone’s money. That’s my job is to be good with their money, good with their investments.

Or you actually dig into the emotion that’s there. I think that iPod commercial with people dancing is you’re creating, you’re showing I can experience this joy if I have all my music in my pocket. So yeah, absolutely. You have to tie into emotion to make it work and to be generally focused on lists of facts.

And while that has its place, it doesn’t have its place at that first touch for a brand. Typically, it’s very rare that a list of facts is actually what’s going to get someone to

The four stages of market engagement

Steve MacDonald: Well, I’m a B2B SaaS founder myself. I’ve worked with tons of B2B companies, and we all fall into the trap of, if we just tell them about our product, the tech, or the product itself or the service, everybody’s going to come once they know. And so we are subject matter experts of our babies, the products and services we create, right? And so we tend to talk more about that.

But you said a lot, in one of our conversations leading up to this recording, you talked about that stage four, right? Tell me a little about the stages that come in before that product marketing. This is incredibly important in B2B, but that’s a stage four. What’s happening before that in your mind?

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah. So I actually would argue this is exactly the same for B2C. Every time I produced a large campaign for a B2C company, there were people internally that pushed back and it’s like, it’s this kind of cheese on a sandwich because people really like this kind of cheese.

So it’s the same. Everyone wants to basically have this really long conversation with you rather than say the thing that’s actually compelling and gets attention. So I would argue the first step is always just what’s that one thing that is compelling to the target and builds up what you want the brand to be long term. That’s it. Those are those three questions I mentioned. One thing, Target Cares builds up the long term brand you want. That’s the first touch in almost every communication that’s going to get attention.

The second touch goes a little deeper and starts to unwind the problem a bit. And get someone aware that you actually have the comp, they start building confidence. You’re capable of understanding their problem and maybe starts to hint that you have solved the problems for others.

And really, that’s stage three, as far as I’m concerned, is you get down to that next step where you’re actually giving them confidence that you’re able to solve the problem. And once you get past there, then you can talk about the product itself and the specs of that product and what makes your technology better.

Every single, and you said it, every single company thinks they sell the best stuff. And as soon as someone knows about it, they’re going to come running. I have never been at a company that’s worth its salt and doesn’t believe that the flaw is everybody thinks it. So therefore, everyone just tries to do this thing down here rather than have this conversation.

First, I genuinely look at it like any conversation you’d have with a stranger. If you walk up in a party to a group of people and you start by telling your entire life story, you’re going to have people turn away pretty quickly, right? You may think your life story is very compelling, right? And they want to know every in and out of everything you’ve ever done, ever.

That’s not how it works. You start with the light things that you share in common that are interesting. And then you dig from there. And a lot of times you don’t make it to stage four. You don’t make it all the way down, and that’s okay. That’s a filtering process to make sure that is the right customer for you or that is the right person at the party to talk to.

So when you get down to it, you have to start with something light and relatable and interesting. You express the single thing. You do it in a way the target cares about, and you do it in a way that builds ultimately for the brand long term. The technology, the specs, if they want to jump right to that, you let them.

So the wonderful thing about modern marketing is we have a ton of tools. If somebody wants to click straight through to your ad and dig deep on your website to understand the technology aspect, they can let them. You’re not stopping them.

So it’s fine if that’s actually interesting. But 90% of people probably aren’t going to do that. They’re probably going to hit the landing page and decide, well, is this interesting or not? Let me Google it. And then that’s where SEO and SEM kick in and then they’re like, well, let me look to see if I, if this person on the forum is using the thing, they’re kind of this roundabout way of discovering whether or not you’re interesting to them.

And to me, the steps are you get their attention, then you build, you understand the problem, and then you have solved the problem for others. And then you get to the point where this is actually how we solve the problem. This is the technology we use without blocking anybody at any step.

If they want to jump around, let them jump around. If all they care about is staring at the belly man at it, let them stare at the belly man. That’s great. If that gets them to call you, awesome. But most of the time, you’ve got to take them down a bit of a process, just like any relationship.

When content is most needed

Steve MacDonald: And you said something, I mean, everything in there was incredibly important. One thing that really stood out to me is you’ve got to prove that you’re worthy and that you can solve the problem, right? And that you can be trusted. And there’s these words in the B2B world. You have to be an expert, you have to be a trusted advisor, right? So you must prove that you know what you’re doing.

And B2B buyers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be advised, and they want to be advised by somebody that can help them in their job. Right? So this extends out beyond just the actual product into the specific problem that they have. But if they see that, hey, you know what you’re talking about in terms of this industry, right? And what’s happening, what’s coming down the pike, what’s going on, what’s going to impact them in their job. Guess what? You’re an expert in that industry. Experts make better products. There’s this rub-off there.

So all of this, these different stages that we’re talking about, this is all content that we’re creating here, right? If I were to ask you, what’s your opinion, I’m going to have you actually rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of how important is content for the overall success, the growth and success of the business? One, not important at all. Ten, vital to the growth and success of the company. How would you answer that?

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah, so I’m going to give you a caveat before I give you a number. The caveat is I really believe you need to build out the brand infrastructure before you go and throw a bunch of content in the world. And I’m still in that process at my current company. And every company I’ve joined, it takes months if not a year in some cases to build out what is the brand that you are building?

So therefore, what is the point of view of that brand? What is the personality of that brand? And it’s not just a decision you make, it’s testing you do to figure out if the target cares about that point of view. Probably best illustrated in the work we did at Wendy’s. Ultimately at Wendy’s B2C brand we built this snarky brand that was based off of the 1984 where’s the beef commercial.

So that took a bunch of testing because it was controversial at its time back in 2011, 2012. And we weren’t exactly sure if it was going to work, even though the theory said it would work, because it worked in the 80s. And also because we were going after a younger target that used social media in this way.

But it takes time. You have to build out the brand first. You have to build out the team capable of producing content for the brand with some scale and consistency. Because without consistency, you have no brand. So once that’s in place, it’s a nine. It’s very important. And I didn’t give it a 10 because there’s other ways to do it.

I think you can blitzkrieg media and still get to a result. Not necessarily the exact efficiency or the same way or the long term effect, but you can do it in other ways. So I think it’s a nine once you have the infrastructure in place to do it properly. And it does take a little time to build that infrastructure.

Steve MacDonald: So Brandon, we’ve, we’ve talked about a lot here, right? But in this notion of, for CMOs, you have to get some more B2C in your B2B, if there was one thing that you wanted the audience to take away from the conversation here, what would your advice be?

If you have nothing else, have a hook

Brandon Rhoten: What’s the hook? What’s the hook? When you look at any piece of creative, any piece of content, what’s the hook?

Don’t bury the lead. Don’t make it where you’re having to search for that thing that’s interesting. So I really believe you have to have that compelling thing slap someone across the face. Right? As it hits them. Otherwise, you’re kind of wasting everyone’s time and you’re going to become wallpaper. So what’s the hook?

Steve MacDonald: Yeah, I love that. You go to a lot of B2B sites, and you’re reading a paragraph and then another paragraph. You’re still trying to decide who they are and even what they do and what benefit they bring you. Right. There are so many words. I like that singular hook that’s solving that problem. And meaningful to them.

Brandon, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. If somebody had questions or wanted to get ahold of you, would a link to your LinkedIn profile be appropriate?

Brandon Rhoten: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Hit me up on LinkedIn and I’m always willing to talk marketing with folks. It’s a lot of fun.

Steve MacDonald: All right. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you coming on and sharing and we’ll look forward to more coming out of GroundTruth. And it sounds like you’re getting ready to launch a campaign soon that we’ll all want to watch and follow along.

Brandon Rhoten: Great.

Next Steps

Brandon talks about the importance of creative content and emotional appeal To efficiently produce high-quality content, elevate your ROI and revenue impact, don’t miss the opportunity to CLICK HERE and schedule a 20-minute strategy session with Steve MacDonald, founder of ConstentStrategies.io.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.