616: The Evolution of B2B Content Marketing | Edward Purmalis

In our latest episode, we are thrilled to welcome Edward Purmalis, a freelance B2B content strategist who supports B2B brands, coaches and consultants to redefine their content strategy to reach, intrigue, educate and convert their buyers.

Edward’s career had humble beginnings working at a call centre selling air travel, where he moved up the sales ladder and brought in over $400,000 in revenue in his last year. But when the pandemic hit, he moved away from the industry and started selling B2B SaaS for a California-based VoIP company.

He has always been a huge online content consumer and started listening to podcasts when he was 9 years old. As luck would have it, the Founder of the VoIP company he was employed for launched a new company – Salescast, where Edward had the chance to work with B2B content creators helping them build podcast strategies and generate revenue through content. Within a year, Edward became the Director of Revenue Operations and worked with over 100 B2B Podcast Hosts supporting them in launching, managing and growing their podcasts. And his newest passion is building social media strategies that help content creators make the most out of their content and conquer social media.

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The Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

Introduction

Jeff: Welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast! Our show features successful sales leaders, marketers, thought leaders and entrepreneurs who will inspire you with their success stories. Each episode is packed with practical strategies, as our guests share their secrets to achieving their dreams. Listen in to learn the highlights of their remarkable accomplishments and get tips to revamp, rework, and reimagine your business. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer, or an aspiring entrepreneur, the Conquer Local Podcast is your ultimate guide to dominating your local market. Tune in now to take your business to the next level.

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Edward Purmalis. Edward’s career had humble beginnings working at a call centre selling air travel where he moved up the sales ladder and brought in over $400,000 in revenue in his last year. But when the pandemic hit, he was forced to move away from the only industry he knew and ended up selling B2B SaaS for a California-based VoIP company. Edward has always been a huge online content consumer and started listening to podcasts at the age of nine. As luck would have it, the founder at the Voigt company that he was at launched a new company, Salescast, where Edward had the chance to work with B2B content creators, helping them build their podcast strategies and generate revenue through content. Now, after a two-year tenure, he’s the director of Revenue Operations working with over a hundred B2B podcast hosts, helping them launch, manage, and grow their podcasts. And his newest passion is building social media strategies that help content creators make the most out of their content and conquer social media. Get ready, conquers for Edward Purmalis. Coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local podcast. 

Edward, it is a pleasure to have you on the Conquer Local Podcast for this week’s episode. How are you doing? Coming all the way to us from Latvia.

Edward: A pleasure to be here, Jeff. Yeah, doing very, very well. I actually interviewed your previous host quite a while back, so this is a very interesting turn of events that now I’m here.

The Change in B2B Content Marketing

Jeff: Hey, well I’m excited to have you on. I’m a big fan of Salescast and all of the work that you guys do, so I’m pumped to hear your perspective on things. And so let me jump into it. Social media, gosh, looking back now, it’s like, we’ve been using it for almost 20 years now, which makes me feel old. And, but that’s about the time it came along, user-generated content and social networks and they’ve changed a lot over the last decade, two decades. Talk a little bit about what the role you think that social media is playing right now and especially in B2B content marketing and from your perspective, how you think it’s changed in the more recent years.

Edward: Yeah, so to look at the core importance of the role that social media plays in B2B and in how buyers make decisions, we really need to look at the fact that every day that passes is a day that your buyers become the people that have natively grown up sourcing their information through social media and internet sources. And especially with, I would say, millennial and Gen Z generations, there is a lot more trust in peer-reviewed social media than there is in Google searches and in blogs, in kind of one-sided information sources where you can’t see somebody you work with or somebody you know and respect, comment, and lay any insights on a particular topic. So it’s just becoming more and more prevalent that this is how people want to receive information. And now with algorithm-based social media becoming king of all, of just social media in general, it’s becoming a bit more democratized ’cause people have a lot more opportunities to break through and reach even when they don’t have a very large core set audience, which is very, very good. It’s again, democratizing how this information flow is going. But yeah, the more your buyers, the more people who are younger are becoming your buyers, the more prevalent social media is gonna be in those buying cycles.

Dark Social: What is it?

Jeff: Yeah, it’s no longer an afterthought like everybody is incorporating social media in their go-to-market now and it’s not a question of how do we use this? It is sort of one of the key go-to-market strategies. And so it feels like everybody’s getting a little smarter in the way that they use it. Let’s talk a little bit about, I think, which is maybe a new concept to a lot of people, but a super important one, let’s talk about dark social. You guys talk about it quite a bit and I think that you’re probably experts on the topic and I think it’s pretty fascinating.

Edward: So yeah, I mean, dark social as a concept is just everything that you can’t really measure and how your content gets distributed and reached by people. And this kind of rise of short-form vertical videos through TikTok and YouTube Shorts has also accelerated the way dark social works. because when the focus was only to release long-form content, 30, 40-minute podcast episodes, informational videos, and long-written blog posts, the content was not as shareable as it is now. And when you’re approaching something like TikTok and you’re creating a kind of value-driven 50-second video that only really talks on one single topic and it’s kind of a micro lesson that is part of a bigger part of a bigger picture, dark social becomes more and more prevalent ’cause it’s just easier to share. Like if I’m listening to, let’s just say a 40-minute podcast episode and I hear a point that I know somebody else will appreciate the effort that I have to go through to get it over to them is I have to copy a link, I have to provide a timestamp. And even then, that other person from like a user experience perspective has to go in, skip the episode further, maybe listen to the whole thing if they think it’s relevant. But again, it just feels a lot more messy than just having this one simple share button for those 50 seconds that you know are super, super relevant to the person that you wanna share it with. So that’s how I see dark social as a concept becoming more and more prevalent and more and more important by the day. As the way people are used to consuming content, the way the content consumption habits are changing, it’s just becoming a whole different game and being able to articulate and provide value and build trust and rapport within a 50-second window by either having it all relayed during that particular video or clip or having it then lead to that longer form episode to accelerate those efforts and to give more context. All of that is all those are things that you really have to think about whenever you’re looking at your content strategy.

Jeff: There’s so many different ways that people can share content so easily nowadays when they share it through, they text it to a buddy or they shared through email and so, so, so difficult to track. It’s so frustrating for me being a marketer because the promise of web-based marketing was that hey, everything can be tracked as opposed to traditional marketing. When people knew that the marketing was probably happening or working half of their marketing was working, they just didn’t know which half. And so, the promise of web-based marketing was, we were able to measure everything. And now, with this idea of dark social, there’s so much going on and exposure that we’re getting and it’s not trackable. And so, how do you think about it in terms of your overall marketing portfolio and the impact that you’re having?

Edward: I mean, you can always look at the engagement metrics that you have. One of the bigger signs that you’ve gone quote unquote viral on a dark social channel like a community or maybe a company marketing page is if you see a huge spike on a piece of content that wouldn’t have been there previously. Now, if somebody makes a LinkedIn post about your episode, it’s pretty easy to track, right? You’re gonna see it, they’re probably gonna tag you and you’re gonna know where that traffic is coming from. But if it just happens at seemingly random, then there’s a huge, huge chance that you were just a victim of dark social.

Jeff: Right.

Edward: And that’s a good thing.

Jeff: Yeah.

Edward: You know, we can’t really try to measure every single metric when it comes to social media and podcast engagement ’cause it like, there are just not the data sets that are currently available to people are just not good enough to measure all of that. And I don’t really see a workaround for it at this point. I don’t really see like, once somebody figures this out, they’re gonna have a billion-dollar company, right? But until that point, we just have to look at the metrics that actually matter and see if your initiatives are generating interest, brand awareness and leads and those are the metrics that we should be focusing on a 100%.

Implementing Self-Reported Attributions

Jeff: I guess if you have confidence in the content that you’re putting out and you understand your buyer and your audience and you believe in the method in which you’re delivering your content, I guess it’s a positive thing if you are the happy recipient of extra exposure that you really can’t explain and hopefully if your content’s right stuff, I guess you’ll expect people to share it in all sorts of different ways.

Edward: Yeah and one of the ways that you can go about it is to implement self-reported attribution. So whenever somebody signs up for a demo or for a meeting or for a consultation on your web page, they have the opportunity to type in where exactly they found you. And that’s gonna be the closest thing you’re ever gonna get to seeing that kind of impact. But it’s also based on, if this person who reached out to you actually remembers how they found out about you. ‘Cause there’s a possibility they found out about you six months ago through a private channel and then they followed you for a while and now they decided to reach out when they’re in the right spot to have that conversation.

Return on Investment via Podcasting

Jeff: Yeah, so selfishly, I’m gonna leverage some of your expertise. You guys have a fantastic podcast and more and more people are thinking about podcasts and ways to share their ideas with their audiences. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys measure the ROI of a podcast and your production, the effort that you go into it and the impact that you’re having.

Edward: Yeah, so for B2B brands that is purely going to be measured based on lead generation closed revenue. And one of the bigger things that I guess some marketers don’t end up looking at is the conversion rate of those leads. Because just to give a bit of a backstory, like I come from about four and a half years of like direct-to-consumer inbound sales of luxury air travel. And when I started selling for that type of company, the leads would come in, would be motivated to buy, they would know us. We had a lot of brand awareness. So the sales cycles were much less you trying to sell something and much more, two people trying to figure out like what’s the best option here. There was no real friction during that sales process. And then when I joined B2B startups with less brand awareness, I noticed that there’s a lot more friction, outbound sales become a longer conglomerate. And I’m not saying I’m the best outbound seller in the world, not by a mile, but I saw that there was a level of friction there. And when I started personally investing into content and doing the Salescast podcast, I noticed that the leads that would come in through there would have these kind of short sales cycles where a lot of those things that you have to do during a sales process, like build rapport, build trust, educate, all of these things, you can, instead of doing them one-to-one through content initiatives like podcasts, you can do them one to many. So that instead of, instead of you having to have a six-month conversation with somebody when they’re 10% into their buyer’s journey, they have the opportunity to reach out to you when they’re 80 to 90% into their buyer’s journey. Approval in one hand, and credit card in the other hand just there to discuss and iron out a couple of details. So that’s what I see as being kind of the bigger thing you have to measure. Like how efficient is this as a method? How, what are the sales cycles, what are the win rates? All these things typically have much better numbers when it comes to leads generated from podcasts and through content initiatives than they do from cold outbound or campaigns.

Challenges in Content Marketing

Jeff: Everybody loves a short sales cycle and a lot of marketers that I talk to, they focus a lot, maybe too much on the bottom of the funnel. Maybe talk a little bit about some of the mistakes that you see people making right now with content marketing because content marketing itself is just, it’s evolved so much over the last little while and it’s competitive space, it’s a lot of content out there and so, you’re competing for people’s attention. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making?

Edward: Yeah, so the classic mistake with any content marketing is focusing on your services products and how awesome you are, which nobody frankly cares about. Any and all content strategy should start at how do we educate the marketplace. How do we bring a fresh perspective? How do we reach more people, how do we help them? And ultimately how do we tie it back into our own products and services and how we as a company are evolving and evolving our offering. That’s the classic mistake that everybody knows. Now, what I’ve noticed is especially prevalent at B2B and it’s getting much better now. It’s getting much better now, but six months ago, it was plain awful. And something that I’ve taken a really strong stance on is doing the little things that matter. ‘Cause more often than not, I’ll see content marketers in B2B focus simply on the fact that we have all this great information and these great data sets and all of this value that we bring to the world. So we’re just going to kind of spew it out, just information vomit, which again, it’s not a strategy that’s going to get you a lot of reach if you haven’t already built an enormous brand. So start looking at the simple things, things like production quality. If you’re doing video first, like a 720P laptop webcam with a microphone from your Apple earbuds is just not gonna be, it’s not gonna create content that one would call quality. And this quality is becoming more and more of a prevalent topic as we’ve entered this like age of TikTok where everything is video first. Like people have grown an expectation to see high-quality video, to hear high-quality audio. So it’s very important to make that like a one-time investment into a decent camera, a decent microphone. And from there, post-production and packaging, like if you’re going to pursue short-form social media, one of the most efficient plays that you can do is take your podcast and it can be an interview podcast, it can be a solo podcast, it can be internal podcast between you and your business partners. You need to take it and you need to cut it up into clips. But what a lot of people don’t think about is how does this clip bring value by itself? Like, is this just a clip that’s just a snippet from the podcast or is this a clip that actually brings value within itself? Is there any context, is there a hook? Does this actually move the needle within those 50 seconds or one minute or 30 seconds? And if the answer is no, then you really need to rethink that strategy. The best way to go about it is to try to cut out any type of filler, try to add context, try to start it off with a question. And this is especially important if you’re doing, if you’re creating short-form social media content from a podcast, this is especially important if you’re interviewing people. So you could take any of the things that I’ve said in the last couple of minutes and within the first five seconds, without knowing the context, it’s gonna be very difficult to catch somebody’s attention. And ultimately you want to catch the attention of people who don’t yet know about you. So without any context, without the question is gonna be very, very difficult to do that. So really think about how does this clip present itself as an independent asset versus as promotional material.

Creating Engaging and Educational Content

Jeff: I really like that. I remember there’s a pretty popular blog post that was made by Rand Fishkin back when he was at SEO Moz and this would’ve been back in maybe 2015, ’16, a little while ago. And his post was on writing content and he said, “If you want your content to be successful, it has to be 10 times better than anything else that’s out there.” And I like that way of thinking. When you sit down and you create your content, how do you create something that’s 10 times better than anything out there? And it probably takes thinking on a number of different axes, like, what is the medium that I’m using? How does my approach to the content and what are the insights like? Tell me a little bit about how you approach creating content to make it both educational and engaging. Because I find that the content that is the best out there. It has, it’s engaging in some sort of way. And at the end of the day, you have to have unique insights. So it seems like, and I think HubSpot’s proven that the approach to educate an audience is a successful way to approach it. So how do you approach content to make it both educational and engaging?

Edward: Yeah, and to your point about being 10 times better than everybody else here in the B2B world, we kind of have our work cut out for us. ‘Cause.

Jeff: We sure do.

Edward: The TikTokers, the B2C people and the thought leaders who are trying to sell $300 courses on how to get rich have very well figured out all of these little things like how to do hooks, and how to create engaging captions. All this work has already been done for us, but just as a sector, B2B is super slow to implement these types of things, but those who have done it now are seeing phenomenal results as long as they’re still being value driven. Like if you think like a catchy hook, for example, if you think, oh, you know, it might work on these TikTok simpletons, but it won’t work on my super educated buyer. Well, no, I mean we’re all humans. We all enjoy a good hook. We all enjoy things that captivate us. And ultimately you need to take those same philosophies that so many people have been doing for so many years and implement them into your B2B strategy and you’ll already be miles ahead of most of your competition. So if we’re looking at video content, and this isn’t, I’m not an expert on written content, but when it comes to video content, a lot of that engaging part, the educational part, I feel like in general, like B2B influencers and brands have a very easy time creating ’cause they’re doing the work, they’re out there and they have the information they have that educational piece pretty much locked in. Now when it comes to engagement, especially with your first, you have to look at things like production quality. You have to look at things like captions. You have to look at things like hooks you have to look at something as simple as adding emojis or graphics to your short-form videos, captions, like all those things drastically improve the rate that people look through the videos. And this is especially prevalent with short-form videos, and social media because it’s frankly just fried everybody’s attention span. So there’s not something moving around all the time. Then people kind of lose focus.

Jeff: Right?

Edward: And you need to look at all those things and implement all those things with the content you create. And as long as it’s educational, as long as the kind of video piece can keep people’s attention, then you’ll already be miles ahead of your competition.

Creating Valuable Content

Jeff: Yeah, because some of those small things make a very big difference in the final outcome of this, the successfulness of the content that you’re producing. And it’s surprising sometimes of how small a change you can make and make such a big difference.

Edward: One of the bigger things that like people, and this isn’t as popular now, but people on TikTok were creating loops that were basically like the last couple of seconds of the video tying perfectly with the start of the video. So you could actually start watching it the second time around without really noticing. And all of this is done, engagement obviously, but it’s also done to kind of gamify the algorithm. Because like watch-through rate and engagement and all these things are going to heavily dictate if your content is actually gonna be pushed out in front of more people or if you’re just gonna get stuck in the 200 or 300 view dead zone.

Growing Partnerships

Jeff: Lot to think about as you guys, I think at Salescast you guys have done a fantastic job of creating partnerships that has created growth. Talk a little bit about the partnership work that you guys have done and maybe some of the challenges that you see in creating partnerships now.

Edward: So, as a podcast production agency that believes in podcast advertising, partnerships have been pretty frictionless so far. I would say the most important thing there is to really look at kind of your own value proposition during a partnership and really, really, really be super honest with yourself about like, what is it that you bring to the table? What is it that the kind of sphere of influence of the person that you’re partnering with is bringing to the table? But I would say it’s been mostly a pretty frictionless process and we’re super thankful and blessed for all the great partners that we do have and all the great shows that we’ve been able to advertise on as well. But yeah, I mean, partner relationships are always super exciting. I’m always a huge fan of like overextending a little bit ahead of the status quo or maybe ahead of an agreed list of deliverables and processes when it comes to partnerships. Because ultimately partnerships grow together and that’s the most important thing.

What does Success look like?

Jeff: Edward, go and toot your own horn a little bit. You guys have had a lot of successes with the people that you’ve worked with. Share one or two successes and show people what success looks like in this area.

Edward: Yeah, so one of my favourite projects to work on recently has been kind of a niche project that really only targets FinOps, which is kind of a smaller function, but it’s becoming more and more prevalent every single day now that we’re entering in this recessionary times and whatnot. So seeing that kind of very niche podcast project that is literally the first and only of its kind, seeing that have like stable growth of like 30 to 50%. And then hearing the feedback that like, oh, we did a little bit of LinkedIn outreach and instead of people just ignoring us, we’re getting responses like, hey, I’ve been actually listening to your podcast. And seeing that kind of project growing high sort of highly technical, highly niche industry is always really, really, really cool. And just to give a bit of spoilers on the whole approach there, it’s not a long-form interview podcast, it is literally just two co-founders who are experts at this. Having seven to 10-minute conversations highly educational on the topic of the day and seeing that kind of thought leadership elevate from there and seeing them literally create a category has been really, really cool. And when looking at the solopreneur slash consultant space, we’re also this thought leadership content is a super, super important way to generate leads and to just a very important part of your whole revenue strategy as a solepreneur, as a consultant. More often than not, they’ll have this demand creation cycle through their podcast, where they’ll go in and they’ll interview all the biggest fish in their industry. They’ll have a great time, and they’ll see a good amount of views and downloads, but it’s not just gonna convert that well at first. And then seeing people take those audiences and then rebrand their show into a solo act. That, and then utilizing that audience to like, do exactly as I described before, elevate their thought leadership, have conversations and educate their audience. Seeing just the super drastic difference in lead generation that comes from that type of effort of having this kind of solo podcast is always an amazing thing to see.

The Process of Launching a Podcast

Jeff: The guests that we’re blessed to have on this show share so many insights and cool stories throughout the length of the podcast and it’s hard to bundle ’em all up. If you were gonna sum up one takeaway that you wanted to leave people with, what would it be?

Edward: Well, if you haven’t started a podcast yet, you should simply because it’s a super, super efficient way for you to have a content strategy. You’ll have your long form, you’ll have your short form clips, you’ll have your blogs, all of that can be done and produced by only taking, 30 minutes to an hour from your leadership’s time or from the host time or whomever your biggest subject matter expert is. So I would say, if you haven’t started yet, then you know TikTok.

Jeff: Yeah.

Edward: And I would tell people to just set your expectations, set your expectations, not based on vanity metrics, but based on the fact that you’re creating something that is evergreen, something that’s going to be out there forever. And it does not matter if your super cool, super educational episode blows up today or if it blows up a year from now, either way is gonna be out there and the traction’s gonna keep going and it’s gonna snowball and you’re gonna do great.

Jeff: It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to spend a few minutes with you and chat about content marketing and how to leverage podcasts. And I hope that we have the chance to do this again. If people have questions and they wanna follow up with you, how do they reach out to you?

Edward: Yeah, anybody can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Edward Purmalis, my name will be in the episode, I presume in the link somewhere as well.

Jeff: We will.

Edward: Yeah, so LinkedIn would be great.

Jeff: Edward’s been an absolute privilege. I want you to have an amazing week and I hope that we have the chance to chat with you in a not do distant future.

Edward: Yeah, it’s been a great time, Jeff, very nice.

Conclusion

Jeff: Dark social is becoming increasingly prevalent in the way that people consume and share content. Short-form social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts have accelerated the way dark social works as content that is long-form isn’t as shareable. Therefore, it’s important to articulate and establish trust and rapport in a 15-second window to lead into longer form content. To measure engagement metrics, it’s necessary to implement self-report attribution, which allows people to type in how they found you. By building rapport, trust, and educating people, you can generate more leads and more engagement. To implement an effective content marketing strategy, it’s essential to start with educating the marketplace, bringing details and involving your offerings. It’s also crucial to focus on the simple things such as production quality when pursuing short-form and social media content. To catch people’s attention, add context, start off with a question and think about how each clip presents itself as an independent asset. It’s important to keep people’s attention by implementing strategies like captions, hooks, and emojis, and by extending beyond the status quo when it comes to partnerships and targeting niche audiences, you can elevate thought leadership and see dramatic results. Lastly, launching a podcast is an efficient way to start a content strategy that can be converted into short and long-form content. If you enjoyed Edwards’s episode Discussing The Evolution of B2B Content Marketing, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives. Episode 530, Increasing Revenue With Social Selling, that’s with Jamie Shanks, or episode 523 Lead Generation Through Podcasting with Colin Mitchell or episode 522 Monthly Recurring Revenue with Mark Girvan. Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome everyone.