The pace at which people are consuming content is rapidly evolving, and for both consumer and B2B brands, adaptation is key to maintaining competitiveness.
I recently sat down with Anthony Kennada, the founder & CEO of AudiencePlus. According to his X, he’s a “B2B marketer trapped in a B2C marketer’s body.” This makes sense, given his company is focused on bringing a lot of the same tactics used in consumer marketing to businesses. His company AudiencePlus is focused on something called owned media. In this interview, Anthony argues this channel is crucial for success in today’s business, as the way people consume content evolves.
Gary Drenik: Tell me about your background and how your time as the CMO of Gainsight led you to where you are today.
Anthony Kennada: My first role in marketing was the CMO position at Gainsight – not informed by tenure coming up through the Demand Generation or Product Marketing or any other branches of the profession. Without the benefit of functional experience, I looked to consumer brands like Airbnb and media personalities like James Corden for inspiration on how to “do marketing” well.
Thankfully, those first principles paid off for us.
We built a $1B+ brand at Gainsight by building and monetizing thought leadership for the Customer Success industry. We leveraged tactics that institutional B2B marketers would classify as brand – things like content marketing, community, and events. We found that these programs were helpful to not only launch a movement behind Customer Success and position our brand as market leaders, but they also helped us generate sustainable revenue growth and create a competitive moat around the business.
I started AudiencePlus to bring those same outcomes to the rest of our industry by building and monetizing their audiences.
Drenik: What problems is AudiencePlus solving for companies today?
Kennada: Marketers have lost control of our impact on revenue. We’ve spent years either paying for access to our audiences through search marketing and digital advertising, or renting access through third-party algorithms on social media, content networks, or even search engines.
With marketing resources being scarce, new data privacy laws, and our changing relationship with social media, companies today are investing in building their own direct relationships with their audience through the well-understood, but somehow marginalized strategy of owned media.
AudiencePlus helps companies build, engage, and monetize their own audiences by enabling brands to become their own channels for distribution.
We’ve built a pioneering SaaS platform that transforms the blog and resource center into a modern media property and allows companies to distribute media like articles, videos, and podcasts, build an audience of subscribers, and understand engagement and the connection to revenue at the individual and account level.
Drenik: The way people consume information is changing faster than ever before with the advent of new social platforms. What does this mean for both businesses and consumers? How can businesses adapt?
Kennada: For most B2B companies, social media has been part of a community strategy. We hire a junior marketer to ‘stay active’ on social media and measure their ability to grow followers on each platform.
But until now, social media has not played a critical role in driving revenue – at least outside of paid advertising.
Given the changing landscape, B2B marketers need to take a page out of the consumer media playbook and make social media the tip of the GTM spear. They view the marketing funnel through the lens of rented, owned, and monetized audiences. At the very top of the consumer media funnel are rented channels like social media – where content distribution and audience engagement begins.
Our teams need to learn the nuances of each algorithm and figure out how to maximize distribution into their audience of followers. They need to experiment with short form video clips native to the feed in order to drive engagement and know when to link back to their owned media property to de-platform that follower into a subscriber.
This is a new muscle to build for many of us, but critically important to enable us to successfully decrease our reliance on algorithms we can’t control and build a direct relationship with our audience.
Drenik: How should businesses be thinking about the “owned media” that they create in order to stand out and capture attention?
Kennada: What I’m seeing as the new approach to content marketing is this focus on creating content for humans, and not algorithms. Content teams traditionally spend most of their time writing blog posts for the Google search algorithms – not what humans want to consume. According to a recent Prosper Insight & Analytics survey, fewer than 25% of people start an online search after seeing an ad, so it’s not a dominant habit.
People are watching videos, listening to podcasts, reading editorial articles, and joining live streams. The mediums are evolving, and our teams are only starting to invest in emerging formats of content.
What we haven’t been able to do historically is measure the impact of these programs, especially when content is distributed on YouTube, Spotify, etc. We are left on the other end of a campaign with an arbitrary number of views and listens.
That’s the benefit to the owned media approach. Not only can we distribute content that breaks the noise and captures attention, but we can also prove the impact of these programs on business outcomes with first-party engagement data that we own.
Drenik: Many speculate that AI is going to completely change how we consume information and shop. Is this something that businesses should already be paying addressing, and if so, how can businesses stay ahead of this curve?
Kennada: There’s no doubt that AI is going to have a transformative impact on marketing. The shadow side is that creating ‘good-enough’ content to distribute online is already happening, and as such, these tools are adding even more noise into an already noisy market.
According to Prosper Insights & Analytics, 23% of professionals are using ChatGPT for content creation. With the bar to create written content being lower than ever before, the pressure to create content that pierces through the noise to truly engage and create value for an audience is higher than ever before
But the upside potential that AI represents beyond the hype is exhilarating.
Imagine if machine learning can sort through the firehose of first-party engagement data to understand which content topics or formats resonate with specific cohorts of our audience. Or if engagement with a certain asset is more highly correlated with pipeline acceleration. Or which distribution channels are best leveraged to drive engagement.
While the first AI wave was focused on generative use cases, I believe the next (and lasting) wave will be leveraged by companies running prompts on internal data systems. Companies who are investing now in curating first-party data will be well positioned to take advantage.
Drenik: Thanks for taking the time to discuss this topic that’s sure to be important to marketers and companies that want to keep up. We’ll be interested to see how AudiencePlus evolves its product in new ways that further support the growth of businesses everywhere.
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