Steve sits down with Sarah Wallace, a consultant at Forrester. She has over 20 years of experience working as an industry analyst and thought leadership marketer while providing consulting and advisory to C-level executives on both vendor and practitioner side.
Over the years, Sarah has consulted for such companies as Futurum Research + Analysis, Oracle, IHS Markit, TimeTrade, and Informa. She has been cited by Forbes in their list of top mobile influencers, was chosen to attend the first Tory Burch Foundation Ambition Summit for women, was selected for Seth Godin's AltMBA program, and was featured in Audi's "Pay Your Dues" campaign.
Listen in as Sarah shares some of the most interesting projects that she had the opportunity to contribute to. These include a social media campaign leading up to the launch of a wearable tracking device for individuals who have a tendency to wander off; as well as conducting a survey for the Gen-Z retail space for a tech startup.
Sarah explains that thought leadership fundamentally revolves around providing value to one’s audience rather than pitching products to them. For B2B marketers, this involves building authority by doing thorough research in a given space, as well as focusing on addressing pain points over selling products on a white paper.
Key Takeaways:
Connect with Sarah Wallace on LinkedIn.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
Steve Goldhaber: All right everyone. Welcome back to Studio 26 and the show today, I am joined by Sarah Wallace. Sarah's got a really interesting background. She's worked at Oracle, she's worked at Forrester. The whole bunch of other places, I've been doing it for over 20 years. So Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Wallace: Thanks Steve for having me. I'm very honored. So thank you.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, sure. So, as we know, we always like to start interesting B2B marketers with stories. The first one you're gonna share with us has to do with.., it's kind of a cool story, right? It's a wearables story by someone who's getting into a new market, they were a new entrant, even though they had some interesting technology. I'm gonna let you take it away. Tell us about the story.
Sarah Wallace: Sure. I was doing social media campaigns for an automotive company. They came out with a wearable tracking device that could be used by anyone who might wander or get lost. Typically this type of person might be categorized as someone who's maybe elderly, someone that might have dementia or Alzheimer's, or maybe someone who has a child that has autism. They knew they were going to be launching this wearable device in probably six months or so, and they wanted to somehow connect with companies that were associated with these communities. That when they did release the device, everyone was already kind of aware that it was coming on the market and there was excitement and there would be partnerships. But having been in the automotive industry for so long, they just didn't have any ties. So they hired me to connect with these different communities. Again, the timeline was about six months. So what I did in both communities, which I also didn't have much involvement with was a lot of due diligence. I started following prominent associations in both areas. Started following concerns. What were the trending topics, and then on behalf of this customer, started liking things on social media, like on Twitter, retweeting them starting to become part of the conversations, and connecting and, sharing things with people in these communities? And then started to mention that this tracking device was coming out. So I would say, probably three months into this and building rapport relationships. They started announcing that this device was gonna be coming out. What was unique about this device was that it could be submerged in water and still work. Which was a big deal because, a lot of times, people when they wander for whatever reason, might be attracted to water. And by the time they launched this device, it was nice that we had a rapport and a lot of the different social media accounts. So when they did launch it, a lot of the communities in both these areas were very excited.
Steve Goldhaber: I was gonna say, when you were doing that, was it you were using their existing account, or did you create like Subaccounts or build something organically from the ground up?
Sarah Wallace: It was a subaccount. But it had their company logo, which is very recognizable, and it had an underscore and then the name of the device that was coming out.
Steve Goldhaber: Okay. And I assume that helped speed things up as far as getting some traction.
Sarah Wallace: Yes. They were justifiably concerned too because you associate this logo with automotive needs. I've been working, doing social media campaigns, and monitoring probably since 2009, and 2010. In my mind this is a really good example of the sort of slow, steady, really building your network and becoming part of a community. And then, even afterward, after they started selling it, working with these different associations to distribute it for both of these needs. It wasn't something that we expected. But then someone says, “Oh, my grandfather was lost and we live in Florida. He got lost and because of this device, are we able to find him.” Then it kind of became and after they would use the hashtag in the device. I'd say in terms of social media, it's probably one of the most rewarding campaigns I've ever worked on, just because it was a device that was helping two very important communities.
Steve Goldhaber: How did you do the launch? Did they continue to use social to continue to engage or was it more of like a traditional launch campaign where it's like, well, “we did a buildup, we launched it, and then we moved on?” How'd they approached it?
Sarah Wallace: I was still doing social media for that campaign probably six months after the launch. Only because they were starting to get feedback and more engagement. The example of people being found, which I think is great, right? They didn't just launch it and forget it. They continued the engagement.
Steve Goldhaber: It's just interesting, companies in social media, sometimes brand teams have that vision for the account and they tend to be grounded in advertising principles. Then other times people who truly understand social media and community are managing them. In your experience culturally, how did they wanna use social or was it some mixture of both?
Sarah Wallace: They didn't have much use of social, right? So they had a Facebook account they didn't do much with. They had Twitter, and I think what they were doing on there was pretty minimal. They did maybe post some updates now and then, but they weren't engaging at the time. So this subaccount was the first time they were actively engaging. And I also used some social media monitoring tools to be able to measure sentiment on their corporate account, their existing account, and also on the subaccount, which they were like, “Oh, wow.” They were monitoring the sentiment and seeing that the engagement helped increased awareness.
Steve Goldhaber: I've always been fascinated by sentiment tools. I'm always a little suspicious because I don't know today or even back then, have they cracked the code for the sarcasm and the trolls that live online? Not so much on the account that you're talking about, but anytime I was presented with sentiment data, it was really hard to classify, and, you have to get into the weeds to go in and say, “Well, can you show me the log where you said these keywords are generally positive and these are negative or neutral.” But it is that love-hate relationship with people. It just brings another qualitative dynamic into the conversation.
Sarah Wallace: I agree. I remember back then when I was doing a lot of social media monitoring. Even reading, statistically, if people are talking about a brand on social, it's probably because they're complaining about them. So even taking that kind of thing into account.
Steve Goldhaber: Anything else about the first story before we jump into the next one?
Sarah Wallace: I would just say the other thing that I learned with that was patience. Right? So I'm very pragmatic, if you do this, this will be the result. And I think waiting months and months to see the result and slowly build something was a good lesson for me about patience and something like building that network does take time.
Steve Goldhaber: Alright. Let's jump into story number two. This one has to do with a “retail” story specifically involving Gen Z. So take it away from story number two.
Sarah Wallace: Sure. I was working at a startup, a tech startup that had a platform that was able to serve all different types of verticals. They wanted to penetrate the retail industry. They already had an impressive roster of some major retail chains. They were making an appearance at NRF, which is the National Retail Federation Show held at every beginning of every year in January at Javits Center, New York City. They wanted to kind of put themselves on the map. So I started in the company in November. So they said, “Sarah, we're going to NRF in January, let's do something kind of like really having a presence there.” So I did a retail survey asking consumers about retail and their sentiment about buying purchasing big topic at that time was in-store versus online versus popup stores. What were consumers' preferences? I wanted to be able to do different demographics and different age groups. I might be a little bit biased, my kids are Gen Z, so I said, I really wanna include Gen Z, but at the time, a lot of Gen Z were under 18, and for them to complete the survey, they had to get their parents' permission. We were in a little bit of a time crunch, so, at one point I almost gave up and I thought I don't know if we're gonna be able to do this if we have to wait for Gen Z to fill in. But we waited and we pushed a little bit more and we were able to fill in Gen Z. And the great thing is we did a press release kind of highlighting some of the results and we got press coverage. Not only just retail publications, some niche retail publications, but also media like Forbes and US News Report. I don't know that anyone had done a Gen Z retail survey at the time, but it just really got picked up. So by the time we did get to NRF, people were coming to the booth and wanting a copy of the report. We had Microsoft and IBM retail. Divisions approach us and ask if they could work with us maybe on the next report. And I believe both became channel partners. So I guess both personally and, just in terms of the b2b, just an example of the kind of pushing and trying to do something that's maybe unique at the time paid off.
Steve Goldhaber: I'm a huge believer in research being really interesting content. I think companies will default so often to just “Here's our opinion on something. Let's publish, a case study or a white paper.” Any time I've seen a company do research, it's just new interesting stuff. You can talk about the data and, no longer your role as the B2B marketer, as, I am the expert in this area. It's just, we fielded some research. There are some really interesting things we're sharing and, have a look, it's not as much of a marketing pitch, and many companies have done that approach where it's like the annual survey that you do, and then you start to get a backlog of years to compare the data and then all of a sudden, the classic example I'll always go to is the Edelman Trust barometer, right? Like they have just owned that space. They probably have 10 to 15 years of data on that thing. It's kind of like, who can touch that now? As they own all that trend data. I love that approach. What are some things, that surprised you from your research learnings about the Gen Z audience?
Sarah Wallace: What really surprised me and millennials and Gen Z, I thought this answer would be the opposite. We post a question at the time there was a rumor that Amazon might be opening physical stores. So we said, “Would you prefer to go shopping online at amazon.com or go into an Amazon physical store?” The younger generations chose the in-store experience, which was surprising.
Steve Goldhaber: That is pretty interesting. As native to digital, those in-store experiences are helpful. I was shopping recently at one of the Amazon things called Amazon Fresh. It's not the like quick-to-go version where you just walk in and out, but it's the legit grocery store. The same concept where you just scan to get in and you don't have to check it out, but it's, just a whole fascinating model where you're applying that much digital thinking into retail. And it was fun. I've done it several times, but it's still a very novelty and I always have the feeling like I'm stealing food. When I leave the store, I'm looking around suspiciously like, Are you gonna arrest me? Cause I'm just leaving. I'm just leaving with this.
Sarah Wallace: Well, It's funny even when I just go into a regular retail store and they say, “Do you want a receipt?” And I don't really need the receipt, but I usually say yes because I feel odd walking out of the store with merchandise with no receipt. I feel like I'm just stealing and walking outside. I'll even say to the cashier, “Actually, I will have a receipt so it doesn't look like I'm stealing something”. I'll start laughing
Steve Goldhaber: I know it is. It's such a weird feeling ‘coz like you're used to shopping receipt bag, they would look at the bag that you have and you'd at least say, “Well, I have a bag from your store. So clearly I didn't just right leave without paying.” But it's a fascinating thing. I wonder how much research has been done about adopting that. Cashless register experience, and how do you get people comfortable with not having that awkward feeling that they're stealing stuff? Anyway, maybe that's our next research discussion.
Sarah Wallace: Yeah. And also what do the younger generations feel. Does that even bother them? Do they even think anything of it?
Steve Goldhaber: Cool. Thanks for sharing the story with us. let's jump into how you got started in B2B marketing. What was the first project that you worked on in the space?
Sarah Wallace: Well, I honestly can't remember the first project per se, but, I think it was probably 2010-2011 when I was working as an industry analyst, but doing a lot of custom work with all these major tech companies that we're coming out with a new solution. We want to sell it to these enterprises. We need thought leadership and end-to-end everything. Even from “Can you help us name the solution, help us with the messaging?”, to the thought leadership, and then going to a conference and helping present it. Maybe doing a blog post for them about it as well. So even though I was positioned as an analyst, I was working with CMOs and directors of solution marketing. I was doing maybe four different campaigns at a time for about five years. So I think that was my kind of dive into B2B marketing, even though it wasn't my title, I was helping all these CMOs with exactly that.
Steve Goldhaber: Here's the struggle I believe every analyst goes through. It's almost like the church and state argument, right? Like there's the data, we need to tell the story about this topic. And then the marketer comes in and is trying to either alter that information to make their service or their product seem better. Like, describe the struggle, that you kind of has experienced with, the church and state separation.
Sarah Wallace: Oh yeah. Especially if I did a survey and the vendor would have a hypothesis. “We're coming out with this product because the market needs it,” Then I do the survey and the end users would be like, “We don't really anticipate that as a revenue generator for us in the next five years.” So a lot of times the results were not what the vendor wanted or was expecting. However, the good thing about surveys is that you can ask more detailed questions. So they would say, “Yeah, not really.” However, when you dig deeper and you say, “Why”, they would say, “Well, we don't really feel like we have the backup office systems to support that right now.” So then you kind of like flip it on its head and be like, Okay, well even though this can be a major revenue generator in the future, this many end users feel like they don't have the back office systems and this vendor's coming out with that support.
Steve Goldhaber: And research too. It is fascinating how you do have to go deeper into it ‘coz sometimes, people don't know what you're doing, right? you can't always share everything about a new product. Sometimes there's always the research bias of just sometimes people tell you positive things. That's certainly, at least when I did focus groups, people want to please, right? Like, “Oh, well let me tell you about how I want this or how I like this.” An interesting factor of what's the right thing? I did a lot more focus groups as it relates to ad campaigns, which was also kind of scary because sometimes the people in this focus group can be dictating what's the best concept. Their ability to understand the marketplace, you had to question it. They might like this more, but is it gonna work? It's always that balance of research is an endpoint or an input as opposed to. Like the final sign-off. I think the challenge that some of the clients I worked with in the space, some were there to learn, and some were there for an insurance policy, meaning they had a lot of money behind a campaign and they wanted the consumer to sign off to say like, “we give you the thumbs up, launch the campaign.” It really became this thing of just getting out jail free card to say “Well, the people I shared it with liked it so.” But anyway, I'm getting very politic here with my research. But there's always that struggle of what you do when the research doesn't tell a good story. If you've got 10 - 15 questions, if you get one or two really interesting stats, sometimes that's a win, because then that stat can lead with that as a hook just to get people into the whole idea. Tell me more about, like, you've, My guess is you've done more on the long form side. What's your kind of like, as you approach a piece of long-form content, how do you think about it? Or are you jumping to the outline? Are you jumping to the problem? What do you think about the early stages of long-form?
Sarah Wallace: So let's say I'm hired or I'm doing like a 9 to 16-page white paper. That leadership white paper, it's not necessarily focused on the solution, but just more. I think of it as an inverted pyramid. Kind of broader, here's the space right now, and then down to like, what are the pain points for people in this space? What can help with these pain points? Either talking about the company and what they offer or not talking about it. I guess if I had to do a visual, that's how I think about like an inverted
Steve Goldhaber: I like that. It helps me in content creation too. What I've observed about clients I've worked with is like the ones who truly embrace the content marketing vision of not selling, just helping is they gravitate to the pain and they just push the solution as far down as they can in that content. One software company I'm working with now is, they're like, “You know what? This is a 12 to 14-page piece of thought leadership. The last page is when we want you to even mention the product.” Culturally that's so fascinating to me. You have some clients who are like, “no, we don't want this to be seen as “salesy”.” And then another client where they're like, “Hey, we're 30% into this piece of content and like, we're not talking about ourselves.” It's like Good or bad. It's fascinating to see how, and in my experience, it's all driven by culture. How are people using content? Is it the sales department trying to creep into the content? Or are you a purist and you truly view content as helpful so that when they're done with it, people kind of go, “Oh yeah, this was a great piece. Who did this? What do they do?” It's a hard thing to kind of feel out what the best approach is.
Sarah Wallace: Yeah. I had that happen. I did a white paper for an AI company. The paper was mostly thought leadership and then a stakeholder jumped in at the last minute. Because he had editing rights and he sprinkled product mentions all through it. So then the first stakeholder said, “What are you doing? Sarah wrote this awesome piece of thought leadership and you're ruining it.” I was just like, “so they had it out.” I was like, okay. I mean, were two very strong opinions on it. I think in the end there was a little bit of a compromise. But the first stakeholder was not happy because there were two paragraphs, and there was this ad or one of, their solutions. But yeah, it's funny exactly what you're talking about.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's funny ‘coz sometimes we'll work with a bunch of clients and they'll push us a certain way and then we'll fall into that trap of “Okay, our content's moving this way.” Then you start doing that for another client and you're like, “ Wait for a second, we can't do that for this client they don't like it”. It's funny to keep track of that as it relates to long-form content. I was doing a trend report for a client recently, and they had a struggle too with this “Is it short form. Is it long-form? Is it somewhere in the middle?” My advice to them as it relates to long-form, ‘coz the argument always goes something like this. No one has time to read long-form. People just aren't gonna spend 10 minutes or 15 minutes reading something. And what I enjoy about long form, especially if you're publishing it online, is that there are SEO benefits. You have the room to be an expert so you don't have to just talk about something in a thousand words or 1500 words in a blog post. You can get into some domain authority about what you're talking about. The other thing, I kind of challenged them on is I said, “Look, if you've got a 10 or 15-page white paper, the goal is not necessarily to have everyone finish that white paper. If only half the people finish it, to me that's a win. And the people who didn't finish it, still look at your organization as someone who is an authority.” You have to have that authority to write a lengthy white paper. So I think that's what I've encouraged clients to think about not only the like diminishing readership through the piece, but if you have a long-form piece and half or a third of the people get to the end, like those are your people who are interested and you have to serve them. The people who stopped halfway, they're not ready. So don't worry that they stopped. Anyway, I'd love to get your thoughts, would you agree with that? Do you have another opinion on the way to think about readership for a longer piece?
Sarah Wallace: I do agree with that. Even personally, because I'm constantly working with words, people make fun of me because I'll say I don't read books and I don't because I'm looking at words all day. I just don't feel like looking at words when I'm relaxing. But, I love the New Yorker. If I see something on Instagram that they've posted an article about something, I'll kind of like bookmark that post and When I have time later, I'll go back and I'll read the whole story. I do think even if you have a white paper and it's in your resources on your website, and especially if the title of the white paper is reflecting really what it's about. You can say “how to overcome these problem areas or these challenges.” And then people be like, “Oh, you know, we've been struggling with that.” That's interesting that they've written this in-depth paper about it. And you hope they would come back and read it. But as you were saying, it kind of reflects your expertise. I did a white paper for a company based in Europe and they said, “Sarah, we had this big deal with a perspective, deal with this operator in India, and they were kind of on the fence and we gave them your white paper”, and they were literally like, All right, let's do this. And I was like, “Really?” Because I do all this kind of work for these large tech companies, but I never get the follow-up. So I was like, “Oh my gosh?” He's like, “Yes.”
Steve Goldhaber: It's crazy the power of long-form content in my own business. It surprises me when I do marketing. My book is the ultimate long-form piece of content. I've had people, it's kind of funny, I've been trying to target this one business for a while. They haven't engaged much, but then the head marketer downloaded my book, and, I don’t know if they read it all or they just read 20 - 30 pages of it. But they told me this on a call recently and they were just like, “Oh, yeah, yeah”. You don't even have to talk about your philosophy. I know it. And they were referencing all these things in the book and it was a nice reminder of how long-form content helps. You get, your philosophy out there. It's the authority aspect. You know, “Hey, this guy wrote a book, he's gotta be an authority on it.” “ How did he fill up 300, 400 pages in a book?” I'm a big believer in the, not to ignore short form, but long-form has its place. Don't shy away because something is just gonna take a long time to be created.
Sarah Wallace: Especially even if it's in my white papers different sections have a subtitle. Maybe they're anxious to read more about this one subsection, Right.?I had an industry research report that I did. It was like 25 pages. I was kind of creative and I did this chart comparing vendors in this certain area, a major Canadian Operator. Cable Operator emailed our research company and said, “We want that report, but we really just want the chart. So can we just get the chart? We'll pay for it.” They didn't want the rest of the report. It might even just be a particular piece of content near long-form that sticks out to you
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I've seen some companies embrace maybe what I'll describe as an open-source content philosophy. For example, you have. Research or something that you're writing about. But then I've also seen more companies just publish the data in literally like an Excel spreadsheet. If you want access to the data, please come get it here. I've always been fascinated with that. You lose a little bit of control over the material, but you're genuinely helping someone. That's also part of content marketing is the, “Wow, you guys were smart enough to realize that I actually wanted the data. Thank you”.
Sarah Wallace: And there's that huge debate. Should this content be gated or not?
Steve Goldhaber: Right. Yeah. Where do you stand? Maybe there's a one-size answer for that, but what do you feel about the gated argument?
Sarah Wallace: Yeah, I don’t know. When I worked at a smaller startup on the marketing team, and when I worked at Oracle, honestly I don't know what the right answer is but what I have observed, tell me if you've observed this, you can have the most experienced CMO but they're hemming and hawing about it too. I feel like everyone struggles with whether to gate this or that. Do you observe that?
Steve Goldhaber: I always observe the struggle. I think everything is unique. If I had to come up with like an overarching philosophy, I would say do a little bit of both. If you have two or three pieces of content that you know is amazing and something that no one else can do. I would go with gating it, and then the rest of the content purely just from like the advantage of SEO is ungate that stuff. I think that it's always hard, but if you're committed to something and if some marketers aren't into the SEO game if you are to publish that without gating it, it's just such an advantage. Especially the long-form stuff, cuz that's gonna rank better. Well, just have a couple more questions for you here. I'm gonna call this the love-hate question. What do you love about B2B marketing? What do you hate about it?
Sarah Wallace: I love helping companies, whether it be smaller or you know, a large enterprise. I think it's really professionally a great experience to help them bring something new to the market. Not just the marketing team, but the developers, everyone that's worked on that. And then when you help them bring to market all the things that they've been working on for months that are coming to fruition. So I really enjoy that aspect. I think what I don't like is just maybe when there's internally some struggle, right? I gave the example before, the stakeholders that had the conflict of opinion, or if there's someone that I'm working with and they change their opinion or they're indecisive, that part I don't like.
Steve Goldhaber: Okay. So one final question for you, Sarah. Tell me about looking back, if you were to teach yourself, or if you were to talk to someone new in the B2B marketing world, what's the best advice you would give to them?
Sarah Wallace: I would say to my younger self or someone who's entering B2B marketing, I feel like every company kind of has their personality or culture, how they approach things, and just to take that into consideration. There are so many different personalities that you're going to work with. You know, I've worked with some major tech companies and they'll have 12 stakeholders on the kickoff call. They all have varying opinions and you can tell the process might take a while. Then I've had the other companies that assign one stakeholder to work with me one on one, and that person makes pretty quick decisions and it wraps up pretty efficiently. So I think to bear in mind that every company, your team, has its kind of culture and don't take it personally. So I don't know if that makes sense.
Steve Goldhaber: No, it's good advice. I think the really good content marketers understand that the actual content is kind of half the challenge. The other half is, to your point, the culture and the structure of the company. Having the foresight to kind of think about potential obstacles is “Does the CMO understand this? Do they want it to be pure content versus sales enablement?” Fleshing those out early on so that you don't get frustrated. Because the love-hate part of the content usually takes a while. Like the good content takes time. I always try to diffuse any bombs before they explode on projects because you put a lot of effort into content and you wanna avoid that bomb exploding weeks down the road. Where it was like, “Well, you never said this.” But that makes sense. All right. Well, Sarah, I enjoyed the conversation. I'm inspired to create more long-form content after talking today. Maybe I'll think about the next long-form content for my own business. Thanks again for joining and everyone else, thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you next time.
Sarah Wallace: Thanks so much, Steve. Thanks.