Subject Matter Experts and Marketing Success

Monique de Maio, the founder and CMO of OnDemandCMO, a 25-year-old marketing company that serves some of the biggest names in B2B marketing, talks us through the all-important need for messaging and supportive content that are table stakes for her client relationships—and their success.

In this interview with host Steve MacDonald, meet Monique de Maio, the founder and CMO of ondemandCMO, a 25-year-old marketing company that serves some of the biggest names in B2B marketing, such as IBM, Intel, Cox Communications, and Iron Mountain. Monique discusses the importance of content in B2B marketing and how it can be leveraged across the buyer’s journey. She emphasizes the need for companies to have a unique point of view and message bolstered by subject matter expertise that sets them apart from their competitors.

Monique de Maio, Founder & CMO at OnDemandCMO – Follow Monique on LinkedIn

Monique explains that thought leadership and highly valuable educational industry content sparks conversations and establishes trust with potential buyers. Monique emphasizes the role of the CMO as a business leader who understands industry trends, where the needs of the buyers are headed, and the implications for the company’s future success.

Monique further emphasizes the importance that industry expertise has for the emotional connections between companies and buyers, which is equally as important as the products or services offered by the company. She explains it as a feeling. It’s comfort. It’s trust. It’s all of those things wrapped into one. If you’re not comfortable with the person or company providing you with whatever it is that you’re looking to get, there’s always going to be that tug. Did I make the right decision?

“Companies can be full of great marketing people, but they’re not usually full of subject matter experts in their industries, which makes the need for creating smart and relevant content for their customers even more important.” – Monique de Maio

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Introduction to Monique de Maio

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of B2B Marketing Perspectives. And some of the perspectives that we’re going to get today are incredible. We have Monique de Maio, and she is the founder and CMO of ondemandCMO, a 25-year-old marketing company that serves some of the biggest names in marketing, B2B marketing that we remember and know.

And maybe what we should do is, Monique, just tell us a little bit more about your background, and then we’re going to get into content as a two-part episode that we’re going to do today. We’re going to talk about the importance of content, and then we’re going to talk about how we leverage content in a whole new buyer’s journey that’s emerged over the last few years.

So maybe you could start out and just tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Monique de Maio: Sure, sure. So, as a traditional marketer, I started my career at IBM, went to work on Wall Street at Salomon Brothers, ran programs in marketing for a trade association, the Promotion Marketing Association, then was publisher of Brandweek magazine for many years, and then created because at the time I felt that the agency model was broken.

I felt that clients were given an all-or-nothing scenario by their agencies. It’s like a take it or leave it kind of thing. And certain things, some clients needed other things than other clients needed, but we didn’t all need the same things. And I thought that there had to be a better way to do that. So our mantra started with you only getting what you need when you need it, how you need it, no more, no less.

So it became that model that I was very client-focused and very client-centric in how we deployed our consulting. And so we typically bolt on to the mid-market. We’ll bolt onto a company as their marketing department because all of us have different functions here, and we’re able to do that. And when we work with enterprise clients, like brands that you might know, like Intel or Cox Communications, Spectrum, Iron Mountain, Jabra, Avaya, or some of the other technology names, specifically tech services is our sweet spot, and what we’ll call complex selling. So if it’s not a complicated sale, you can go to pretty much any agency. But when it’s a complicated sale and a complicated product or solution, you probably want to work with somebody like us who understands the industry contextually.

So that’s what differentiates us is that we’re very good content creators. And that’s probably one of the reasons that I was referred to you to have this conversation, to begin with, because some of these companies are full of marketing people, but they’re not full of subject matter experts in their industries, which makes the need for creating smart and relevant content to their customers even more important.

Steve MacDonald: Well, that’s a good segue into a question that I love to ask. And that question is: in terms of the importance, the vital importance to a company of content if you had to put it on a scale of 1 to 10, where one’s not important, it’s not vital at all. 10, it’s vital to the company. How would you rate that and why?

Content as a differentiator

Monique de Maio: It’s an absolute 10. So as an example, when we’re rebranding, let’s say we repositioned and rebranded a cyber security company, and they were very well known in their space with the customers that they had, but outside of their customer base, nobody knew them for anything.

And all of a sudden, we started writing white papers and points of view and great content for the CEO, and the phone started to ring. The LinkedIn invitations started to come. The speaking engagement started to show up. All of these things happened because people realized that he had a perspective.

Of course, we were ghostwriting for him, but we understood his voice, and we understood his knowledge base. So there was an ability for him to speak to a greater message. And that’s really the issue, is that a lot of companies don’t have a point of view. They don’t have a message, whether they’re big, smaller, or huge.

And the content shows that they’re trying to be like their competitors. And that’s completely wrong.

Steve MacDonald: And so you said two things that were really important there that I want to ask you a little bit more in-depth on. One is, talk to us about the point of view.

What is, when you say a point of view, are you talking about the products and the features and the benefits, or are you talking about a point of view on the industry and educating the industry? What is that point of view? What’s your thought on that?

Monique de Maio: So a point of view is interpreted as an editorialization of either the industry or the trends or both that are going to impact the lives and or livelihoods of brands’ clients or customers, depending on if they’re end users or B2B.

So the premise on point of view can be a variety of different things. It can be, how is my point of view on the industry and what are the implications, and what do you need to be prepared for? It could be a point of view on something that just happened, regulatory or compliance-oriented points of view, which impact the organization as well.

So we have a client. They’re concerned with compliance and regulations from the governing bodies of this country because of regulations that impact their membership. They have to address what they have to do, whether they’re doing lobbying, whether they’re doing advocacy, whether they’re doing education, or all three, which they do. They need to be reacting, but they need to be proactive in their points of view so that their membership is relying on them to say, What do I need to know?

How do I need to know it? And what do I need to do about it? So it’s the same thing if I’m doing a campaign for Intel resellers, as an example. What do they need to know about what’s going on in chips as it relates to in-vehicle entertainment, or how does it relate to energy, agriculture, healthcare, or financial services?

How do these things find themselves in execution in the world, and what does it mean? And if you can be smart about something people want to buy from smart people, they don’t want to buy from dummies, so if you can differentiate yourself from just your pure play content and elevated points of view, you’re in the game.

If you don’t, then you’re not.

Content creates conversations

Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because nobody wants to buy from faceless organizations. They want to buy from people they trust. And all the industry research today says that sellers need to be trusted advisors. They need to be industry experts, right? They need to be somebody that is helping to educate their buying clientele.

And is that what I’m hearing? Is that the bucket of content that you’re talking about here is helping them do their jobs, understand the dynamics in their industry, what’s changing, what’s influencing, and what should be influencing their buying decisions? That’s a bucket that is very unique and different.

From the all-important bucket of what was traditionally the lower funnel. And I know in the next episode, we’re going to talk about the buyer’s journey, the buyer’s journey process. But true sales enablement and product marketing feature benefit case study, very important. But what you’re talking about here is a different level than that.

Monique de Maio: Yes. I mean, some people call it thought leadership. I mean, that thought leadership might be a bit overplayed now because I’m seeing companies come out with brochures and calling them white papers, and I have to laugh at that because I look at them and I’m like, Oh, that’s a real brochure. And I think buyers see through that pretty quickly and don’t insult my intelligence by slapping the white paper label on something that is all about your products and features and benefits and speeds and feeds.

I don’t care. So if you want to really educate me and give me a valuable premium content white paper, it better be worth my name and email address that I just had to give you. And we’re going to get access to it.

Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s the point of view that we have the content strategies that we adopted.

It was from an article that I read in Fortune magazine. It said that content marketing solves problems, and thought leadership sparks conversations. That’s good. What does that mean to you?

Monique de Maio: It definitely does because thought leadership isn’t intended to make a sale. Thought leadership is intended to create a dialogue.

So somebody said to me the other day, how do you get your clients? And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean? And it was kind of a naive response, but I was like, well, they recommend me to other people, and that’s how we do it.

And I’m not responding to RFPs. The point of view is that if you want my point of view because I understand your industry and I’ve been in it for 25 years, I’m going to give you my best thinking because guess what? You’ve been in the same company for 20 years. But in 20 years, I’ve seen 15 companies like you do things right and do things wrong and try this and try that.

And I know what works and what doesn’t. So I have context for my content.

Steve MacDonald: And so this is something that we talked about before we hit the record button, and you said that there was a perspective that your clients had to have before you would accept them as a client. And it was about content.

Can you explain that to us?

Choosing clients carefully

Monique de Maio: There are two things to what makes a good client, one, and what makes a good agency with that client. One is that they both need to have the proclivity and the desire to have a dialogue rather than a monologue. That’s one. The other one is I’m going to tell you what I know will work, not what you asked me for.

So you may ask me for a widget, and I’m going to give you something that’s maybe to the right or left of that widget because I know that if you did the widget, it might not have the results that you want it to have. But also, if you’re going to just go out there and try to throw spaghetti against the wall and then not back it up with great content that actually supports your new repositioning or message, which I would have helped you develop, I don’t think it’s a great fit because I’m going to fail. And I don’t fail.

So we’re not in the business of taking on business that is half-baked. Right? So if you go to market with a new story, you better back it up with great content that supports that story. So if you’re not willing to do the backup, we’re not a good fit for you.

Steve MacDonald: And, in fact, I’ve been a fractional CMO for years. And I would have to say that the easy part is actually doing the messaging, doing the positioning. The difficult part is what you just talked about, which is backing that up. But that content is going to spark all-new conversations. That is going to educate. That is going to establish the company and the key players as experts.

So how do you do that? Is there a light bulb moment? Because most companies and this is well documented, don’t have good content strategies. And most companies don’t even have a content plan, right? So if you’re not ready to kind of put the meat into the meal, then we’re not going to be a good fit together.

So how do you get them from saying, yes, I want to do this, oh okay, how do we get it done?

Monique de Maio: So the first step is, the first gate is when we start with research we do with competitive research on the marketing and sales enablement front. And then we do keyword analysis research before we even open our mouths as to what the rebrand or reposition messaging needs to be, and so once we present that to the client, if they say something like this, Wow, that’s great. That’s exactly what we do. That’s great.

I couldn’t find the words to describe that, but you have, this is it. Okay, then the gate opens. Now we can walk through the gate, and now we can have another conversation. Okay, now we need to reverse engineer what that messaging said and where it needs to show up, and how it needs to show up.

So if you’re going to talk to me about your reliability, your interoperability, your flexibility, and your open standards, and how you are a plug-in to all of these other technologies, then I have to have case studies around that. I have to have a point of view as to why that’s important. I need to have keywords in key places, and the content needs to support those attributes in an indirect manner.

So you have to reverse engineer your messaging and positioning so that when you’re creating the content, it nests underneath it. And then, we walk the client through the three key marketing messages. So if you can’t remember, people can’t remember more than three things anyway. So what are the three key messages that you want to remember besides the high-level positioning?

And then, what are the three key messages? If you notice how people speak, they like to speak in threes. Did you notice that short, fat, and bald? Skinny, blonde, fast, cheap? You can go on and on and on. It’s always three. So three words behind me. There’s an intentionality to that. So you want to leverage those, and then you make sure that everything that you put out supports all that.

Building your value proposition right

Steve MacDonald: Where in the mix is that? We’re always trained as marketers and sellers that we address problems, right?

We solve problems. We understand the pain points of the companies and the buyers. Where does that fit into the construct of creating the content and the messaging? You know, when you talk about the three keys, are those founded around those pain points?

Monique de Maio: So the value proposition, or the positioning statement, should be obvious to the potential buyer. Why should I do business with that brand company entity? And in that message should be what it is that they solve for me. So yes, that’s sort of, for me, a table stakes kind of thing where if you’re not addressing the pain points of the potential buyer, you’ve missed part of the exercise.

So you have to, thank you for putting a finer point on that. You have to, in some way, shape, or form, bake all of that into it so that they see themselves in your value prop, in your positioning, and say, Oh yeah, these guys get it. Let me have a meeting.

Steve MacDonald: Now I’m going to go up one level from that.

So this is from a study that came out in the last couple of years. And it basically said that more important than believing in your products and your services is the belief in you as an expert.

Monique de Maio: Totally. I totally buy that. I totally buy that.

Steve MacDonald: So that goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation here in terms of the kind of content that sparks those conversations that adds to the industry.

So that was what you said. I totally agree with that. I’m just going to ask, what is your thought on that? Your point of view on that?

Monique de Maio: Yeah, it’s funny because I can totally buy into that, and I don’t even need to be sold on that. Because I just get a sense from you that you know what you’re doing.

Okay. Well, all right, it’s a feeling. It’s comfort. It’s trust. It’s all of those things wrapped into one that if you’re not comfortable with the person providing you whatever it is that you’re looking to get, there’s always going to be that tug. Did I make the right decision?

Do I have buyer’s remorse? Am I partnering with the right entity? Am I, am I, am I, am I? And if you’re able to validate that both emotionally and intellectually, you’ve got it.

Winning through going back to basics

Steve MacDonald: So thank you. What I would love to do is, I’d love to ask you: if we were going to summarize what we just said here, a takeaway, like I was a CMO, I’m looking to hire you, we’re having a glass of wine right now.

And I said, you know what, Monique, what is it that I really need to know? What do I really need to do here to be successful?

Monique de Maio: You might need to rip the bandaid off. So I would say, so is this how many glasses of wine have you had? No, I’m kidding. Depending on the level of wine consumption we’ve had, no, I’m kidding.

I’m always honest. I think what I would say to that question is you need to get down to foundational basics. It’s the most difficult thing for people to get because they’ll often come to me and say, I really need a new website. And I’ll go, really, tell me more. And they’ll say, well, you know, we needed a website.

Why do you need a website? Well, because we’re kind of, you know, irrelevant to our marketplace, and we look a little stodgy, and we just need to make it look pretty. Do you now? You need to make it look pretty, do you? Huh. Okay. No, the answer is you have to do the foundational research and assessment as to where you are in the ranking of your competitors and in your industry.

And if you’re not happy with the results based on what it is that’s going to come out of that research, keyword analysis, marketing, sales enablement, partner, all of those different points, you’re going to have to look at yourself and go, what is wrong with my message? Am I clear? Am I unique? Am I differentiated?

If those three are no, you’ve got to go deeper. And then it’s, you’ve got to remessage and reposition, figure out your attributes, figure out how you go to market, and then do really smart content marketing to support all of that. Because that’s the foundational hard part. Making a website is easy once you have the right words in the right places.

It’s what are the words? And what’s the behavior? Because that’s the other thing. If you’re not willing to put the processes and behaviors in place to support what you say you are – I’m easy to do business with. This is my favorite. The company is going to have to remain nameless because then I will incriminate myself, but then it’s a large company.

And they’ve always liked to say that they were easy to do business with. Well, once you interviewed their partners, they were anything but easy to do business with. So when you have a disingenuous claim like that, you lose complete credibility. So that’s the summary of the wine conversation is foundational.

Let’s rip the bandaid off. Let’s identify where your shortcomings are. And then, we’ll create a marketing plan to address how you bridge the gap.

What CEOs want from a CMO

Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to ask the same question, but I’m going to come from a different angle, all right? We’re starting up a series, and it’s going to be what CEOs want from their CMOs.

So now, if that question, that wine conversation was, you’re the CEO of that company. And I’m your new CMO that just came in. What are you going to tell me that you really want me to focus on? Because you’re the agency. You’re the strap on the marketing department, but we know that the CMO has to be a catalyst within the company itself.

And I know you’ve played that role as well. So what do CEOs want from their CMOs?

Monique de Maio: So they want a business conversation. They don’t want a marketing conversation. And I think that’s – you know, I like to say that I come from the business side first. I worry about your P&L first.

And then I worry about your marketing second. And that is the CMO. I think I just read an article this morning about this. The future successful CMO is going to have to be a bit of a futurist. So the CMO has to be that thought leader within the organization to identify trends and implications for the business.

So if AI, ChatGPT, BARD, and all the rest of the open source AI tools are going to get layered onto my company’s process, business model, both, whatever. What is that going to mean in two years, five years, and 10 years to how we need to respond and also educate the market? The CMO has to be prepared to answer that question.

Steve MacDonald: Makes perfect sense. In other words, you’ve got to have a vision for where the business is playing in the industry, where it’s going, and how the industry is changing. And if you’re not, guess what? You’re not understanding your customers. The number one thing you need to do, right?

Monique de Maio: You have to kind of understand where your customers are going to be in two to five years, minimum because you can’t create really smart marketing if you’re not leading the charge. If you’re just reactive to what’s in the industry right now, then you’re just playing catch up.

Steve MacDonald: I love that. I love that. And in fact, I wish we could just keep going on and talking here, but we have a whole second episode coming up because what we’ve done is just established in an incredible way.

Thank you. The importance of content, what kinds of content, the role that it plays, the role of the CMO. The next time we get on, we’re going to talk about how we leverage that content. And specifically in the whole new buyer’s journey, right? When we were brought up and taught what the buyer’s journey is and how linear it was, that completely changed.

So I am looking forward to part two of our conversation.

Monique de Maio: Thank you, Steve. Pleasure being here.

Next Steps

Monique speaks directly to the need for subject matter experts to be able to create the thought leadership content that paves the road to meaningful dialogues with buyers. To learn more about how any company can create highly relevant subject matter content that is at the forefront of their industry efficiently and at scale, 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.