Rachel Balik, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Demandbase talks B2B marketing, content personalization and innovative b2b marketing brands - The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

Rachel Balik is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Demandbase.
Based in San Francisco, Demandbase is a B2B marketing technology company focused on advertising and is a leader in B2B target account marketing. At Demandbase, Rachel Balik manages the content marketing program and leverages a decade of experience in journalism, public relations and B2B technology to create and deliver meaningful and relevant content to prospects and customers. Rachel is a popular author and her articles have been published by MarketingLand.com, Forbes, VentureBeat, Slate and many others. You can follow her on twitter @wickedrb

Press play below and listen Rachel drop some content marketing wisdom right on top of your head:

The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/demand-base-podcast

Beginning of Transcript

Rachel Balik: Sure. I’m Rachel Balik. I’m Senior Manager of Content Marketing here at DemandBase. We have a great marketing team. So we’re a B to B marketing cloud, which means we really believe in marketing and it’s very exciting to work on that team. I get to work on a demand gen campaign. I get to work with our communications people and I work with products marketing to get the message out about everything that we’re doing. An exciting time to be a B to B marketer I think.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes. I know you’ve been in the field for a while and some people are just starting to get a hang of this whole content marketing thing. But why do you think it’s important? Why do businesses need to focus on content marketing?

Rachel Balik: Well, so I think most of us in B to B know that buying habits have changed, right? So now with digital content and just the digital era in general, as much as 67 to 90 percent of the buying cycle is taking place online. So what that means is that old model where we knew who we were talking to and salespeople to get involved right away has kind of disappeared. That means our buyers and our prospects are doing a lot of research on us online, when we don’t really know about it.

So if we don’t provide them with material they’re looking for in advance, the likelihood is they will find it from one of our competitors. So I think that content is really – in a sense, I consider it a virtual salesperson for that long B to B buying cycle when people are doing research.

Jeff Zelaya: So you want to be visible. You want to make sure people have access to this information because chances are they’re going to consume a lot of that on their own. If your content is not out there and the competitor’s is, then they’re more likely to work with a competitor than they are with you. Great. I have this imaginary scenario for you Rachel. You’re a content marketer, the head of content marketing for a brand new startup out of Silicon Valley. It’s your first day today. Where do you start?

Rachel Balik: I think that there are a few things that happened and not necessarily from a tactical standpoint, from an information gathering standpoint. I want to talk to the top stakeholders at the company and let’s imagine this company is certainly going to have a CEO. But they probably have someone who’s doing private or technology. They may have someone who’s doing the other areas of marketing. I certainly want to talk to the salespeople. I really want to hear from all those people, not only what they think is the most significant thing that the company is doing and their description of the products. But also I want to hear what they’re hearing from customers, from prospects, from the market, right? So as a content marketing, my goal is to – I want to sort of blog post my site. Get on the friend zone with our customers and our prospects. So how do I make friends with this audience and how do I create content that supports an appealing brand as we start to educate the market?