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What is it about rainy summer days? Seems like we’ve had more than our fair share of them this year.

They’re even more annoying when you’re at the beach, the lake, the cottage, the summer home… and it’s during your holidays! Sure, it’s better weather to work, but when you’re somewhere vacationing – staying inside feels extra torturous. Then you just sit on the couch being comfortably numb as you scroll through socials or TV shows… which you can do at home anyway!

Give this song by Pink Floyd a listen as we see what the experts are saying this week.

Streaming Paralysis

Last week I talked about cutting through the noise in the B2B world. This past week, all I’ve seen are articles drawing me right back to that concept. Take this offering from Nielsen (the company that measures TV ratings), for example.

How many times have you logged in to your streaming platforms and endlessly cycled through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+… and were left feeling down when you still couldn’t find anything to watch? Seems impossible, doesn’t it?

Well, this kind of paralysis is apparently common, and Nielsen says that it’s a real problem. In just three short years, the amount of content available to TV viewers has grown by more than 1.1 million individual programs. As a result, it’s typical for someone to spend up to 10-and-a-half minutes trying to find something to watch… and as many as 20% of viewers, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices, give up and go do something else instead.

And then there’s this: “60% of time spent streaming in May 2023 was dedicated to programming that first aired on linear channels. That’s up 5.2% from October 2022.” So shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Gilmore Girls are getting more playtime than made-for-streaming ones. This is just like what we see with music streaming, where people are spending more and more time with older music than anything contemporary.

How does this impact B2B? We should assume our own customers and prospects are facing a similar challenge – with all the content out there, they may be spinning their wheels – need some information, just the basic facts – and giving up when they can’t find any relevant information.

Hope you have a great (last) long weekend of the summer! And as always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Fighting Information Overload! appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

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What marketer hasn’t been swept up in the AI craze? Maybe it can make our jobs easier. Maybe it can help us hit our sales numbers. Or maybe it’s a big distraction…

Case in point – the other day I spent hours listening to AI-generated isolated guitar tracks from Smashing Pumpkins songs. Fascinating… very helpful when you’re trying to learn parts – but I also got sucked into countless YouTube videos of AI-generated music and guitar solos.

Check out this song by Smashing Pumpkins (non-AI version) while we see what the experts are saying this week…

HubSpot’s AI Solution

As a B2B marketing professional, you understand the importance of creating quality content to engage with your target audience. However, this can be time-consuming and daunting, particularly if you’re managing multiple campaigns.

HubSpot’s latest AI-powered tools, the content assistant and ChatSpot.ai, are designed to save you time and streamline your workflows. These tools use advanced artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI to make work easier for marketing, sales, and customer service professionals.

All in all, AI can be a double-edged sword. Marketers should know both the advantages and disadvantages of using AI in marketing before implementing it in their campaigns. HubSpot’s new tools will be interesting to follow as their user base adopts them.

What do you think? Is AI a friend or foe of marketing? Will it speak to your customers in a language they can hear?

Long Tail, Scarcity & Pop Culture

Within a few weeks, we’re going to see thousands (or millions) of new songs created by AI and available on YouTube and streaming channels. Some of them will be mediocre, others breakthroughs, and even some hits.

Pop culture has traditionally depended on scarcity – with only a few TV stations or a dozen radio stations, it’s likely that many of us have watched or heard the same thing at the same time. A popular TV show from fifty years ago probably reached twenty times as many people as a popular hit today.

But the long tail brings other benefits. More choices, more innovation. Not just a long tail of consumption, but also a spectacular decrease in the cost of production. Innovations in computers, cameras, and AI mean that people can make content without permission from a gatekeeper.

According to Seth Godin, creating music – like writing – is an inherently human activity, and it doesn’t go away. People will make the effort. What does go away is the commercial and creative dynamic of thousands of people in places like Nashville and Hollywood trying to become ‘someones’ with nothing but a typewriter or a guitar.

The end of pop and the rise of the long tail and AI brings us back a century. Just like it used to be – small circles of people, not mass markets. But this time with endless choices and a business model that’s hard to visualize.

What do you think? Can you make it last forever?

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Heads or Tails? AI and the Long Tail appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

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Ahhh… springtime. The winter frost is gone, the weather’s warming, and we’re looking forward to the sunshine! It’s a time of year for renewal, hope, and setting milestones – both personally and professionally.

Give this uplifting song from Weezer’s SZNZ: Spring album a listen as we see what the experts are saying this season…

ABM at 20

We’ve hit a milestone for account-based marketing – 20 years since the term was coined! If you know me, you know I feel that ‘ABM’ goes a pretty long way back – albeit under different names or methodologies. But ABM as a term has been around for about 20 years now.

Is it still relevant? Have you implemented account-based strategies in your organization?

In the spirit of springtime and planning for 2023, Marketing Insider provides recommendations to all marketers who must address ABM in some capacity, including:

• Invest in ABM with adequate budget and resources – I’ve seen too many organizations go ‘partly-in’ only to develop ineffective programs that just don’t produce results
• Embed ABM into your overall strategy and execution
• Invest in research and thought leadership to create value
• Create personalized content for specific accounts and personas, with tailored value propositions

While ABM may be hitting 20, some say it’s still in a period of adolescence and growth. What do you think? Take a look at where you started from and where you are today… I’ll bet there are still plenty of ways to continue to grow your ABM strategies!

Too much content?

Weezer’s SZNZ series is a set of four albums released over one year, at the start of each season, with all songs on each album following that theme. What an ambitious goal. That’s a LOT of music to write, record, and release in the course of a year!

But is there just too much music out there?

Today we have the equivalent of a jukebox that holds 196 million songs and counting. About 3,940 songs uploaded daily come from major record labels. That alone is way too much for the music consumer to even begin to process… but it pales in comparison to the 90,000 songs uploaded by indie labels and DIY musicians every day.

Musicians definitely took COVID-19 lockdowns as an opportunity to write. But even though things have (mostly) returned to normal, the DIY uploads that shot up in that time show no signs of slowing down. And what happens to all these songs? About 20% of them never even get a single stream!

This isn’t encouraging for musicians. With all this noise that keeps getting louder every day, how do you stand out?

And what about B2B? Is there too much content out there? I would imagine the same concerns apply – how can you stand out from the crowd when you’re publishing content and competing with such huge amounts of new material being pumped out on a daily basis? And with AI playing a larger role in creation, the amount of content promises to be exponentially higher – making it easier for potential customers to forget you like an amnesiac.

Remember the old adage: marketing to everyone is marketing to no one. Maybe the key to standing out is less about standing out, and a little more about – like Marketing Insider says – personalized, tailored content for your BEST leads.

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Making a Little Bit of Content Go a Long Way appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

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How can you tell when a lead singer is at your door? They can’t find the key, and they never know when to come in…

Okay, okay – maybe that was a bit harsh and tough on vocalists. But it seemed to be a good intro to our discussion on ‘key changes’ this week.

Give this song by Bon Jovi a listen with me as we see what the experts are saying… and pay attention to the key change in the song!

Changing your holiday marketing ‘key’

For years, songwriters used a key change – usually a quick shift up – to add some extra punch into a song. They can range from subtle (yet effective) like all the key changes in the first 30 seconds of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” to the jarring one that comes just past the three-minute mark in Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

As B2B marketers, what can we do to change keys and add some ‘oomph’ to the end of our year?

How about this? Spotify Wrapped 2022, the viral feature that shows Spotify users their favourite songs, artists, and genres of the year, dropped recently, so you’ve probably seen these pop up all over social media ever since. Considering the feature has been out for six years now, CivicScience launched a few polls to get the pulse on users’ experience with the offering.

Other platforms are holdin’ on to what they’ve got and replicating this style of personalized, year-end recap, and the desire for these features widely exists. Roughly a quarter (23%) of US poll respondents 13+ (n=2,506) said they were at least somewhat interested in this sort of year-end offering on other platforms.

The main takeaway: consumers like to see personalized data, and this is likely a trend that is only taking off. How can we use this in our B2B marketing? I’d love to hear from you – have you seen any great B2B examples utilizing this trend?

The death of the key change in modern music

One of the key changes – pun intended – to the pop music charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?

Rick Beato (one of my favourite Ricks!) outlines the change in detail in this cool video. And here are some great examples of hits with key changes.

The keys of G major, C major, and D major are most prevalent in hits from 1958 to 1990. Why? Because these keys are easy to work with on the guitar and piano – the two most popular compositional instruments during this period. Since 1990 and the proliferation of electronic composition, many more keys have been popularized.

If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument.

Furthermore, digital recording software lends itself to a new style of songwriting that isn’t as inviting to key changes within a recording.

While composing, it’s likely that I’ll work linearly. That means I’ll write section-by-section. First I’ll write a verse, then a chorus, then another verse, and so on. One way to create intrigue as I get to a new section is to change something. Maybe the lyrics. Maybe the melody. Or maybe the key.

We hear this in “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. Most of the song is built around a laid-back groove in Ab major, but then on the bridge, the energy kicks up as the song shifts to the key of B major. Because songwriters in the pre-digital age were writing linearly, shifting the key in a new section was a natural compositional technique and Sting used it to his benefit!

With digital recording, this linear style makes less sense, as songs might be built around a bunch of short loops. It’s a much more vertical approach to songwriting than the linear approach outlined above.

How can you apply this thinking to B2B? Recording software isn’t the only technology that’s continuing to evolve, and the strategies that go with them are changing, too. Think about what ‘key changes’ you can use in your own work so instead of livin’ on a prayer you can have a big hit of your own!

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Key Change to Marketing Content appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

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Is attention to detail becoming a dying art in B2B? Call me crazy, but I’ve seen a disappointing drop in quality in a lot of the marketing I see. Is it acceptable now to have external (or internal) communications filled with typos? I think a healthy dose of B2B paranoia – especially when dealing with communications – is a good thing, don’t you? At least that’s what I tell myself…

Give this song by Black Sabbath a listen with me as we see what the experts are saying this week.

High tech hits the repair shop

Have you taken your car to the shop lately? Over the past decade, cars have gotten more complex and computerized. Each vehicle is now studded with sensors, packed with hundreds or thousands of computer chips, and controlled by software. Auto industry insiders wax poetic all day long about the safety benefits of the “software-defined vehicle” – which also enables revenue-boosting data collection and subscriptions that make it safer to be not just an auto owner, but an auto executive, too.

Less talked about are the consequences of computerized cars at the auto shop. Fixing complex vehicles requires increasingly expert and expensive knowledge, and tools that are in limited supply. It’s part of the same trend that has driven farmers to hack their own tractors and triggered legal fights over what rights consumers have over their own vehicles.

How does your tech impact your supply chain? Have you thought about how upgrades to your software might impact those partners that are in the trenches with your end customers every day?

Music in the Metaverse

Touring is exhausting, expensive, and bad for the environment. Some predict that a shift over to the metaverse to solve these problems will open performances to more people, and result in more revenue for artists.

I’m not sold yet, but the people behind the Metaverse Music Festival think they’ve got a handle on where things are going. Call it a proof-of-concept offering to show how musicians can get into the new tech.

The inclusive, “something-for-everybody” lineup of more than 100 artists participating in the festival November 10-13 includes:

• Ozzy Osbourne (!!!)
• Soulja Boy
• A series of J-pop and Chinese idol groups
• Skullz (a virtual group)
• Deadmau5 and other crypto-native artists
• A “Jerry Garcia acoustic stage”

… plus lots of virtual merch!

Last year’s inaugural event attracted 50,000 people over four days – it’s free and you don’t even need a headset to participate.

We’ve seen many events go virtual during the lockdown, but nothing seems to satisfy the B2B audience, which is embracing the return to IRL events… What about you? Are you excited to get back into those in-person events, or do the virtual ones make true happiness?

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post The Dying Art of Attention to Detail appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

Things really are a team effort around here. I’m sure it’s the same at your organization – collaborating on content, customer activities, and marketing programs, to name a few. Nothing is more satisfying than being part of a successful, high-performing team, right? Hmm, perhaps I should be signing these posts ‘the Royal We’…

Give this song a listen as we see what the experts are saying this week.

The Ever-Elusive Alignment of Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing alignment. It’s been preached to death, hasn’t it? There’s no question how important it is – yet rarely do we see it happening!

SiriusDecisions found that companies with sales and marketing teams aligned achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth. Are you struggling to get to that point? Well, here are a few more stats on why this ‘royal we’ is better together…

A collection of statistics that ZoomInfo compiled reflects 10% or more of revenue left on the table when B2B companies can’t align their sales and marketing on the right processes and tech (among many more findings – check out the full list here).

MarketingProfs shares a handy infographic with some pretty compelling numbers. Aligned organizations can:

• Increase revenues by 34%
• Increase customer retention by 36%
• Improve win rates by 38%

You said you believed it but believing won’t fly. It’s great to talk about sales and marketing alignment, but talking about it isn’t enough! If you’re still working to achieve that alignment, what’s holding you back?

Fake Artists, Passive Streams and DSPs

Whether you’ve stayed up-to-date with Spotify’s constant changes and announcements, it can’t be ignored – streaming services are top of mind! This article caught my eye, as it explains the “digital cesspool of greed” that is the world of Digital Service Providers (DSPs).

In particular, ‘fake artists’ comprise about 3 billion of Spotify’s streams. These are employees of production houses that generate songs at royalty rates lower than those normally paid to artists. Apparently, much of this music is generated in Sweden – and one production house in particular is responsible for creating songs for at least 62 fake artists on Spotify representing 7.7 million listeners per month!

This process is particularly rampant on Amazon Music, where around 70% of all activity is instigated via Alexa devices. The vast majority of streams are ‘passive’ sessions: users ask Alexa for some general kind of music and are channeled to pre-curated stations or playlists, all concocted by Amazon. And – you guessed it – a lot of this music comes from these production houses.

Does this really matter? There are always mass-produced content providers. In the context of B2B this is probably like hiring a larger firm that pumps out huge amounts of content vs. a freelance writer. Yes, these production houses are taking streams away from other artists, but is this just the natural behaviour of a free market?

You tell me!

As always, don’t hesitate to call ‘the royal Us’ to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Marketing Content Mass Production appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

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Fifty years ago today, Led Zeppelin IV was released. Yup – I know I already mentioned it last week… and the week before. But it’s a pretty darn influential album on many levels (and today’s the EXACT day)! And I think there’s a lot we can learn from this album and apply to B2B.

Give this song a listen with me and kick the week off with an all-out rocker as we dig a little deeper…

Marketing Lessons from Led Zeppelin IV

Zep’s fourth studio album sold over 32 million copies worldwide, was at the top of the charts for 15-plus months and gave us some of the most iconic hard rock songs ever. But even more noteworthy is its name. Why? Because it doesn’t have one! The album was even devoid of the band’s name or record label! Here’s why the album unofficially known as Led Zeppelin IV offers lessons for today’s marketers.

1. Substance over style – the band insisted its goal was not commercial suicide but a total emphasis on the music – not the people that created it. Essentially, they had created music so special that conventional labels were inadequate.
2. Passionate dialogue – Inside the album, fans found the now-famous four symbols – each one representing a band member – with no explanation or context whatsoever. This instantly sparked conversation and created a viral sensation that continues today.
3. No unbundling – “Stairway to Heaven” was instantly popular, but the band refused to release it as a single. If you wanted to hear it, you had to buy the whole album.

What lessons from Led Zeppelin IV can you apply to your product or solution? Have you seen similar strategies work in the B2B world?

Are Your Leads Lonely?

Has it been a long lonely, lonely time since your team has followed up with your leads? I’ve had some very enthusiastic responses and feedback to our latest webinar – discussing best practices in lead follow-up with one of the top experts in this field (and she actually works with me)! Check out the recording here.

Music Industry in 10 Years

As we wind on down the road, how do you think the music industry is going to change? This great article by Bob Lefsetz outlines how the music industry will most likely change in the next ten years. Will some of those strategies leveraged by Zep have any relevance?

Check out his predicted trends, including:

• People will stop complaining about streaming payments
• Live acts will need to be developed in different ways since live venues have changed so much
• Hit songs are tracks people know, not tracks pushed by ‘the machine’
• The gap between hype and reality will continue to widen
• E-sports will continue to grow
• Festivals will thrive and YouTube will mean less for music

I don’t know but I been told how the industry will change… and it’ll certainly be interesting to see if these predictions do come true – and of course, how B2B marketers will adapt to these predicted trends as they do happen!

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Zeppelin Marketing Tactics for B2B appeared first on Virtual Causeway.