Steve sits down with Steve Lafontaine, Senior Director Of Marketing at Granicus, a software company which provides the first and only civic engagement platform for the public sector.
Trusted by over 6,000 global government agencies, the platform connects people and government with a unified experience that integrates website, online services, digital communications, and more to serve every resident equally and inclusively.
Listen in as Steve explains the ins-and-outs of working with a B2G (Business-to-Government) company, and knowing when it might be beneficial to all parties to publish data that your company exclusively owns.
Creating a proprietary index can be an invaluable marketing tool, particularly if tailored to the top 20 players in your industry. When creating this index, Steve recommends the hub-and-spoke model, with an emphasis on the hub. The meatier the hub, he says, the more opportunities you have to recycle and reuse content.
Ultimately, it pays to be strategic about which data or content to withhold and which to freely share. Exclusivity for its own sake does not automatically translate to more dollars. Being cognizant about the value you bring to your ideal client, as well as the most appropriate way to present that value, is what distinguishes the best B2B marketers from the rest.
Key Takeaways:
Connect with Steve Lafontaine 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, welcome everyone. Back to Studio 26. Today I am with Uber marketer Steve Lafontaine and by Uber Marketer that is not in the brand name, that is just in the generic description.
Steve Lafontaine: No, no. I'm a user of Uber, but I do not work for them.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Today's episode is gonna be changed to Interesting B2B Marketers called Steve. So we're just gonna chat with each other and after the show, then we'll rebrand to the normal one. So anyway, Steve, thank you. Thanks for joining the show today. Excited to have you on and talk marketing.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. Always a pleasure to talk to you, Steve.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. So like we do, we open up with some case studies or some stories. Tell us about the first story that you wanna share with us.
Steve Lafontaine: Sure. So I worked, uh, recently, in the last few years I worked for a B2G company. So we were marketing to the government, non-federal so that was all cities, counties. We worked in a fairly nuanced market within the government as a software company. Our focus was on FOIL law, Freedom of Information Act, so public records requests, that sort of thing. Our software helped not only with the front end sort of requester side of things, but also the meat of the tool was really in the backend and how our customers processed those requests and then gathered all that information from all these different departments and people. There's a payment side of it and all these things. But I came on as the first marketing hire and within the first year or two, you know, one of the big first initiatives I enacted was around content marketing and namely using the data that we had as an organization, as a way to drive authority. So I think a lot of times organizations position their authority based on information that anybody could figure it out by doing some Googling, right? I think when content becomes truly powerful is when you as an organization are uniquely positioned to offer content based on data that only you have, right? So as a market leader in this space, we were able to build an index that quantified the growth and change and sort of growing complexity within that specific sort of niche space and for you content marketers out there, like that type of big juicy content piece with a lot of different legs and a lot of different data and a lot of different offshoots is just gold. Because you can take a single piece like that, maybe you rerun the data every quarter depending on what it is. You can take that and you can really recycle it in all these different ways and so we were able to, in our little corner of the SaaS government world, we were able to build a name for ourselves through this index and we had interviews with AP reporters and we got a lot of coverage in government specific government technology, specific publications and that sort of thing. And for me it's just a story of like, as a marketer, as a B2B marketer, as a content leader, right? Like taking those assets that are uniquely yours and figuring out a way to use those in ways that nobody else can because they don't have access to that information.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that is such a rich area. I love when marketers go this path. It's either the original research or the original data, and all of a sudden it just gets you into an arena of credibility because the people who are reading your content, truly don't know it yet. Like there's so many times we just write posts, that are topics that have been recycled, but that original data or research.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah, it's so fun and it becomes a fun foundation because you can not only have that piece, but you can add layers onto that. So, you made a comment about survey data, right. As a market leader in the space we were in, we also had this gigantic customer pool, right? So we were also able to survey our customers and now you can start to add more colour, sort of qualitative information and sort of layers on top of that core data set to put some narrative around it. So it's not just getting more and more difficult for you as a city or a county to process public records requests. But here's what your peers are saying. Here's how they're addressing some of these issues, here's some unique testimony from them on how lonely it is and how they feel misunderstood within the right. Like all these sort of therapeutic things for people that work in this space and you as a marketer get to be the steward of that. Which is why I do this stuff. It's so fun to help people in these very genuine ways and oh, by the way, be supporting the business that you're representing and that you're helping build, you know?
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So there's a moment of truth in this type of a marketing play here is I've got clients I've worked with who are randomly in both camps. Like we've got this amazing data. We'll never share it because it's all the secret sauce and you obviously were able to overcome that. Was there much pushback in publishing the index?
Steve Lafontaine: Interestingly, the pushback was there were sort of two internal friction points, I guess. One was, how concerned are our customers going to be with us sharing this data, which led to us being very overt and sort of part of the elevator speech on this thing from the beginning was anonymized data, right? Like there's no individual account data. These are all generalized, sort of thrown into the bucket and spit back out as information things. So you weren't sharing any individual data. That was really the biggest friction point or pushback that we got as we were sort of concepting the idea. Sorry for your other question about what other sort of pushback or push back we might have gotten. I lost it.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, no, it has to do with a lot of companies who have this data, the last thing they would do is publish it even though they can anonymize it. And sometimes it's just, that's gold. Right? And I think some people just get too nervous and they're too sensitive or sometimes the industry that they're in is too sensitive to even play that game to be like, “well, no, we're in this security business like we would never dare create an index of anonymized information.” It would just be too bizarre. But I think the people who do overcome that in a way that obviously is sensitive to the client data.
Steve Lafontaine: I think that comes back to being just the start, middle and end of your business mode of being a servant to your customers and future customers. This information is too valuable to not put out there if our competitors want to use this information to help establish their product goals or set their value prop in the market like by all means, come and get it, right. Like for us it was very much we wanna position ourselves as a market leader. We have this information in front of us that will allow us to sort of stand in that position. And if our competitors want to use that, so be it. We had competitors we would catch on occasion referencing that index, not realizing that it had come from us like that's the kind like gold, that's like we can all dream of.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So walk us through as you start to publish this index, what happens? What are some surprises or tell us what goes on.
Steve Lafontaine: I would say one of the things that surprised me without going into it, cause I wouldn't be able to if you asked me to, but like the math of what we were creating at the outset felt like it would be very simple, right? Like it's, “oh, we sort of throw all this in, divide by the number of things we threw in and output.” But it became a labor and it became a much longer process than I expected it to and if I could go back and do it again, I either find an internal resource that is a hobbyist data analyst or I would find an external resource and pay them to help with that sort of number. Because when you're creating something like an index and their account, any number of companies you can name that do hiring indices and state of the union type things you're sort of trying to emulate what they're doing without having a full understanding or why like it's its own thing, but you're trying to lead to a single number and then you're trying to have these supportive numbers that dive deeper into it. And it got far more complex than I think any of us expected it to, to the point where in year two and year three, we would be adapting things and you're trying to remain consistent because the value of it is in its longevity and sort of the tracking over time. So you can't change it too much either, so you've gotta sort of establish the way it's gonna be out of the gate. Knowing that you're trying to track it and sort of report on it on an ongoing basis.
Steve Goldhaber: The thing as a marketer, I was gonna say to you, a lot of marketing campaigns live for a year, for two years, but when you do these indexes, it's strange cuz you're like, this could be going on for 10 or 15 years. The Edelman Trust barometer still lives today and that was just a small idea that it's like, maybe we should do this every year. So it's interesting how you have to think that part through.
Steve Lafontaine: The challenge that can be and we ran into this is when nothing changes, right? So we had this trajectory and we were reporting on it quarterly which in hindsight we decided, “okay, we only need to do this once a year, maybe twice a year” because it's still getting harder to manage this. Like there's no news to it, right? How do you take that sort of initial launch? We did a nice job of sort of exposing the data to the media outlets that we partnered with so that they could actually take it and display it in their own way. So we actually ended up with a lot of, I guess, free work and media outlets sort of displaying the data in these kinds of interesting ways that we hadn't thought about which was really powerful. But then after that initial launch, the next quarter, you're coming out with the data and it's like, “Yep, things ticked up this much. Right?” Like trying to find news that was challenging for us. So, we moved to more of a content or a calendar based method where it's like, “okay, this month we're really gonna focus on this aspect, next month we're gonna focus on this aspect, right?” And so you start to dice and divide things a bit to make it more interesting and to give you more to talk about is still a value and is still interesting.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You know, one thing I've seen, it's rare that companies do this, but I've seen it a couple times where they actually will publish the index like, here's our narrative on what this means. Here's it's all the normal thought leadership stuff, but then they actually link to the data set. In a database or sometimes is like, “Hey, here's the Google Sheets or the Excel document”, and I love to see that because it's kind of like it's a company truly embracing content marketing and just saying, you've seen our take on it but here's the actual data. You manipulate the data and do what you want with it. I've always been fascinated with that level of maturity of a market ingredient station just to release it.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. It's the hyper version of your question earlier about internal struggles with how comfortable we are with releasing this data and sort of letting it be known, like that's pouring gas on that and saying, you know what, here's our interpretation of this data. Tell us what you think. And I think that takes a very mature organization in probably a mature market, right? That sort of has an understanding and has interest. Right? Like you could put that out there and nobody accesses it because nobody gives a hoot. Yeah, that's really interesting. I always love that when I see links to things and it's like the actual Google Doc or the actual Word document, spreadsheet of the data and it's like, “oh my gosh this is goldmine”.
Steve Goldhaber: I've seen an example of that, this isn't really in the B2B space, but in the City of New York, publish Cab data, I think they, like cabs, have to report this data back and someone went in and analyzed it and was like, here are the like 10 corners that if I hang out near, they're the most rides. So like, then it was like all this intel on like, where do you wanna, where do you wanna go as a cab driver that doesn't have a long line, you know, it's not the predictable hotel line. It's like this, these random corners that you're gonna get good fares on quickly.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. I love that. And it always makes me think because I enjoyed that project and we found a lot of success in it in future roles. That's always gonna sort of be top of mind for me, right? How would this organization, how I was supporting this client, can I execute something like that? And I imagine their organization's out there that are saying, well, I don't, I don't have that type of data. They work in a product space that just doesn't allow that. You mentioned earlier, customer survey data, right? Like running a quarterly survey of 50 of your customers. And it doesn't necessarily have to be just, here's our 10 questions, but creating some consistency in conversations so that you can start to identify some level of trends and what's changing. There's plenty of organizations and professional associations and things like that do that sort of thing. Working in the government, there's an organization called NASIO, National Association of Informational Officers, something informational officers. But every year they put out their top 10 State CIO priorities and everybody always watches for that because cybersecurity's gone down three levels this year. And everybody gets to overanalyze what that means and dive into the data on why that data is based on survey and conversation and not based on product usage or some other sort of hard data, I guess you could say. Which is another interesting angle to take, I guess.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The other thing too, like I've seen companies take this in almost as like a prospecting tool. So let's say you're going after like your CIOs, right? And you want to try to have conversations with 10 of them and that becomes your introduction. Hey, my company is doing research just for CIOs. Here's the specific topic. Obviously you've got to respect them, like this is the no sell zone when you get this meeting, but it's a 10 minute research survey or whatever the collection tool is where that's now a brand experience thing. So for 10 minutes someone at least got to know your company.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. So we could work both the client side and the prospect side. We always had dreams of turning the index into something that somebody could work through some system or some set of questions or some tool where they could input their own information and then compare themselves to their peers. You can imagine how valuable that would be as a lead generation tool, you could do a podcast conversation with somebody where you actually go through that process and compare them to the index as a seller. You're not asking for time to do a product demonstration, you're asking time to walk through how you compare to your peers of similar size and scale. You can just imagine how powerful that comes. That becomes a consultative sales motion because to your point, no sell zone, I'm just here to help you. I'm here to show you what's going on in this space and sort of explain to you how smart I am in this thing.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I love that. I've heard of people doing kind of a related application of that. And the example is we've identified you as someone who we think is a best client because you meet these 10 criteria, whether it's their size, the industry, the software stack they use, and the conversation is almost like. If you just tell us these 10 things, then you're gonna have a lot of success with our tool or platform because it's geared for you. And it just becomes, almost, like a game show. It's kind of like, Ooh, this is kind of interesting. Like, yeah, totally am I gonna be a good fit or not?
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. Well, in government as a Public Organization, and this is the space we are representing. Like a lot of the information that feeds into that is public record. So as a seller, if you want to take an account based approach to your market and your sort of sales motion, like go find your 20 biggest fish and go do that work. Fill that out for them and then you can go to them and say, “Hey look, we have this industry leading index. You know, it shows the growing complexity of this, that, and the other thing, I did some analysis on your own organization. It's like the sellers that will reach out with a screenshot of your homepage with five bullets of all the ways that your SEO is being destroyed because you don't have your X, Y, Z scheme set up on the right. You know what I mean? Like those are the things that as a buyer, sort of raise your eyebrows. Cause it's like, oh, there's. There's value here outside of just the software, there's an expertise potentially with this organization that's gonna make me better, smarter, more efficient, whatever it is.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I mean it's like it's marketing as a service as opposed to just a communication vehicle. It also reminds me of Neil Patel, the digital marketing guru. We should invite Neil on the show one day, see what he has to say. But he had a sales strategy, which was to target private equity or venture capital backed companies who owned a portfolio of 5, 10, 20 companies. He would do all the SEO analysis to say here are the 10 things that are broken about your website. He would solve it for them. So here's like the five 10 page proposals that I saw, I'm just giving this away, right? He then would wait for the parent company to forward it to the CEO of the business and say, “ Hey. Neil sent me this and it sounds like he knows what's going on. Can you address this?” And then the CEO would kind of be like, “Well now I have to do something” because he would essentially just use it as a sales tool where he gave away his thinking and then the CEO, not a lot of CEOs of businesses are at that SEO guru level and he is like, “well, you seem to know what you're doing.” And so again, marketing is a service. If you can do it is a very powerful approach.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah, even internal marketing teams and B2B organizations are, I mean, there's a perfect example of the programs that don't work are the ones where marketing is off doing their own thing. I know it's cliche to say these days, but like that partnership where sales is involved and they're executing against and feeding and helping support and drive the thing that marketing is doing like that's gold. It's not marketing going off and creating this blog and you hand it off to the sellers who might include it in their signature for a couple of weeks. It's like, how do you actually get them included in it so that they have some ownership in it? We had our standard sort of disco meeting and the pitch deck had a slide or two on our index. The sellers were trained up, they understood the content: A. because it made them smarter about space but B. because it gave them sort of an asset to go into market with, and another excuse to call on prospects. I love that example from Neil because the sales calls that I accept. So working at a Software company, I'm prospected often. The ones that always raise my eyes are the ones that I always have to respond to are the ones where it's your CEO saying, Hey, this looked interesting. So it's like, okay, I can't instant delete that, right? I have to at least go to the website and give my boss a reason why I didn't call this guy back. But if that seller did a good job right then, I am picking up the phone and I've bought software that way. Because somebody sort of found the right way to, yeah. SEO's a great example of that because every CEO knows they should be doing it. Well, many of them don't know exactly what that means or how to go about doing it well. So if you've got somebody coming in say, Hey, you're not doing it well. I had a founder I worked with who was always whenever our competition ranked above us just fired him up. Like, how much money do I have to spend to make sure that I'm not being outranked by these guys nipping in our heels. And it was always you rolling your eyes a little bit, but that becomes important.
Steve Goldhaber: I feel like this is its own podcast. I feel like we're also upsetting a lot of the B2B marketers listening right now because they're like, oh my, My marketing sucks. I need to create my own index or my own proprietary data set. It's just a rich area to be in.
Steve Lafontaine: I think the lesson here, the idea here is that creating I forgot who does the hub and spoke thing. There are companies that talk about a sort of hub and spoke type approach to content, you probably do yourself, right? But like the media, that hub can be right, like that core thing, in my experience, the meatiest core thing you can create is something based on reality and again, something based on data or information that only you as a business have, the easier your job is gonna be in sort of recycling and reusing and turning that into a webinar and a gated video here and that kind of thing. Spend your sweat equity, take an extra week on your brainstorming to think about that core thing that you're sort of centering your activation around. It's so much easier than doing machine gun marketing where you're doing 30 different things of seemingly unrelated value. Sort of core message versus creating that one thing and sort of spinning out of that what you're doing. It's a much better use of resources, that's for sure.
Steve Goldhaber: And please, you have to assure me that there wasn't a senior data scientist who got paid $800,000 a year to create the index. It sounds like it was very much like a grassroots thing.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. We had somebody in our technology group that had built, I'm gonna butcher this so I apologize, a SQL workflow something. Some script that he could run that would export that data, and then he was able to translate it into a spreadsheet that my team and I would sort of use on a quarterly basis. It was literally just spreadsheet stuff. The hard part and the big effort was on the upfront and sort of coming to agreement on what it was and you get very good at the elevator pitch on how the data was calculated and how it came to be. Because as B2B marketers, when you have an idea or you have a program, you end up pitching it to 20 different people, 20 different times. So that was a big part of it too, really making it a simple message and being able to speak to it in really clear ways.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Awesome. Great story. That was a really good one. Is there another story out there, or are we gonna jump into the get to know you part?
Steve Lafontaine: How about some attribution conversations? This isn't exciting enough, but only to the people who care about how their businesses are run is attribution is important. We realized that we were, and this is also, I was still in the. B2B space, B2G Space, we realized that we were sort of in that random active marketing mode where we had anecdotal evidence and understanding of what it was and wasn't working. But we didn't have a good way of actually tying that to dollars. So we had a newly launched CMS platform, some marketing automation. So we knew that we needed to tie everything we were doing into that CMS, that all of our contacts were enrolled and tied into an object that allowed us to track it down the road. What we didn't have in place is how those engagements actually tied to dollars. And there are any number of software solutions you can go to now that will do that attribution for you but it's really expensive. So we actually found a piece of software gentleman that created a piece of software that had a very simple model within this cms, popular CMS in the market that for low annual costs would allow us to very simply say, in a linear attribution model, and we could do some U-shaped stuff and some more sort of complex things, but we just did a first touch is the same value as last touch, a person who engages in these three programs or campaigns ultimately ties into this amount of money. Take each total amount of money and split it, divide it by three and assign it to that campaign. So like just this very simple, like dollars to campaigns and programs. Method that allowed us to actually start saying, you know what, the webinars that we're doing with these three associations sure do seem to lead to higher value opportunities. So maybe we should be doing more with those organizations or when we go to these trade shows, the leads we generate off of those end up being a much lower ASP than the folks that come to us through our. And have already done their research on the upfront. I think the story there and the lesson there is that you don't need to spend out of the gate and it depends on the maturity of your business and where you are in your growth.But you don't need to spend a hundred thousand dollars on an attribution model when there are tools out there that allow you to do some very basic linear touch attribution to start to learn exactly what is and isn't working, and then you can start getting fancier with is first touch more value, is last touch more value. Do you want to go U-shaped or all the different shapes that you can do for how you attribute to that. But that was a big learning curve for us at that organization because again, historically we tied dollars to the demo came through the website without thinking about that person had sat on a webinar a few weeks beforehand, or that person had received a call from one of our SDR reps back in July or June or whatever the month is. Not a super interesting story. I think the lesson there again, though, is you don't need to over-engineer some of these things out of the gate.But you need to do something to start learning exactly what is and isn't working.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I mean it's fascinating how many organizations just look at the front end of marketing. So if you're buying media impressions, the cost of the media, the click through rate, all that stuff I was in I remember doing a financial service ad buy for someone and the client was just obsessed with media efficiency. It was all about if there's 15 properties, these eight were way too expensive, we would never wanna spend money on these really expensive properties. Once we got the attribution connected to, in this case it was deposits of dollars, all the front end media metrics went away because what we learned was the most expensive two or three websites that we were advertising on we're generating the most in deposits per click or deposits per new account. It just was an eye-opening moment because we switched into thinking more of kind of like CFOs, right? It's not about the cost, it's about the return. And without that attribution, this brand would've gone on forever in just buying cheap media and it was at no fault to the media folks, right? The media folks were always trained on efficiency and value, and you know why these four sites are the highest CPMs. Why? Like, this is crazy. It doesn't matter if it's working and without that attribution you don't.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. The most frustrating thing I found was that it was like forcing you, and sometimes this can be a bad thing. It forces you to disallow prospect or customer interaction in a way you can't track, right? Like as a marketer, as a user, as a customer centric marketer, I want somebody to be able to watch this piece of content without having to give me their email address, right? I want to do that, but the side of me that has accountability to the dollars I'm spending says, well, you gotta gate that, right? Like, if you're not getting an email address then you're not attributing the ultimate dollars and that's always a struggle. And I know there's not a clean answer to it. I'd actually be really interested in how you consult folks on that because it can be really challenging like how do you take the user's best interest and marry that with your need to prove out the dollars you're spending and sort of learn from.
Steve Goldhaber: That's a tough one. I call that the to gate or not gate question. The way I talk to my clients about it is it's not an all or nothing answer. You shouldn't be a “no, we gate all the content”. I think you have to pick if you have eight amazing pieces of content, gate half and don't gate the others. So you kind of have to hedge on it. And I think ultimately if you're doing it the right way with a strong CRM platform, it's just asking the customer one time, right? So give us your email one time. Anytime they come back to the website providing that they haven't deleted cookies, like they should know that or if you're pushing the content out through email and they're engaging on that email, you should know. It is a tough question, I think it's also a good challenge to marketers because if you do gate something and you believe in it, that ups the game of your content, meaning it's got to be so incredibly good that you have no qualms about saying no, that we're gonna gate this. And it's so good that people are gonna ask for it. I think the challenge is sometimes this isn't really a great piece of content and we're gonna gate it.
Steve Lafontaine: That's where you get into trust issues. Like if I'm gonna give my email to this company, I have to trust that I'm not now gonna get bombarded with unsolicited emails and calls. As a marketer, you have to be responsible with that information. And a responsible sort of steward of that data, which again, I'm sure is obvious to most of the folks listening here, it's really important. Like the content has to be super high value. If it's not, give it away for free. If somebody does give you their email or their phone number, you can't instantly hand that off to your SDR partners and tell 'em to go hammer this person for the next four months. Because you've lost them, right? That's not what they were asking for. I'm dealing with some family stuff and I reached out to an organization that's supposed to help you find healthcare providers and I thought I was sort of trusting these people with, “Hey, I'm in this very sensitive situation, right?Can you help me with this?” And all they did was post my information to this marketplace, and now I'm getting hammered from all these. Like, oh my God, we've all dealt with these types of situations, like maddening. It's like, I'm sorry, I'm never gonna refer anybody to your business. You've been completely unhelpful. I trusted you with this sensitive information with my own personal. As a marketer, I learned from those experiences because I know that that's a level of trust to give somebody your email and you have to be responsible with that.
Steve Goldhaber: Anytime you give the phone number is a moment of trust, whereas a consumer or someone who's buying a service, and I'll admit this, you're either gonna get my right phone number or I'm gonna accidentally miss one number on that phone number and I'm just gonna submit the phone number cuz I want the content. That would be interesting to see is like, can you track the number of good phone numbers submitted versus non good and. That would be a great model exercise to be like, yeah, if someone submits a fake number, it's not a good fit. But I always think that to me, that's the boldest one. I don't mind email. It's the “I will be calling you. For this piece of content.”
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. The phone number is definitely, and especially now that so many of us work from home. I mean, I don't even know where my office phone is anymore. Right. It's either, chat, email, maybe a few special folks with my cell phone number.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Well, I like that story. It was attribution's cool. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. We're now jumping into the softer side of the podcast. This is to get to know Steve. Sure. And we're gonna figure out, when did you decide to kind of become a marketer? Going back in time? What was there a moment, was there some event where you're like, “I love doing marketing.”
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah, I took a graphic design class in high school and I've always been a hobbyist woodworker and I enjoy making things and creating things, and I think that itch was scratched a bit in high school when I took a graphic design class. So I actually went to school, I went to Bradley University in Peoria, go Braves, and I started as a fine arts major, thinking I was gonna be a graphic designer. I'm not a drawer, I'm not a painter. So I had a rough first semester and communications in their advertising program, marketing program was sort of the default, right? I sort of fell into that, but it allowed me that like Creative outlet, but also to learn the business side, right. And sort of how to support a business. And I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed being in a profession where I could sort of support artists and work with artists and sort of create creative sort of things in my professional life and also make money and support myself and eventually my family in that. So I haven't turned back since high school, I guess.
Steve Goldhaber: It's just the only thing that's changed is marketing has been called 18 different things since you started but it is all the same thing. I had a LinkedIn post I created basically saying like, my God, I've been in marketing for 25 years now, and like, has anything really changed? Like of course the technology and data and all these things have changed, but when you break it down to the essence, it really is still the basics of I want to communicate, I want to sell. I want to persuade them that these fundamental things are all the same.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah. I think the transition in my career is where things become different. My family and I live outside of Chicago and we moved up to Madison, Wisconsin for a while, and I worked for a regional bank up there, and it was eight years ago, something like that. But that was my first exposure to the sort of B2B world. I fell in love with the richness of those relationships. I've worked in spirits and beer and pharma and a number of different sorts of consumer, consumer industries and it always felt like we were just trying to be the loudest one, shouting from the highest tower, the thing that was the most eye-catching. And now that I've shifted into this world, I'm actually trying to help people in a very genuine way in support of a business, but in a genuine way. Like, I don't know that I can ever go back, that's the thing I enjoy about my job is helping people and my job allows me to do that. So, the index we talked about earlier, or if it's the content you're putting out of the programs you're executing, they're not just, how can I shout about my product from the tallest mountain? How can I bring some value to this person to prove that we know what we're talking about and we're a trustworthy partner in whatever this endeavor is. Like, I just think that's so cool and I can't see myself ever going back to the consumer side. I'll look at this 10 years from now and laugh at myself, but right now it's like, I just think it's so interesting in addition to the fact that we get to work in all these businesses. It's like marketing and HR. Like, you can work at any company, right? Cause every company needs marketers, every company needs HR, and that's been a fun sort of component of my career is just being able to jump around and work on all these different things, you know?
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. So we've looked back, but now we're gonna look forward. Steve, you're gonna tell us the future of marketing. If you were to take a guess at something that wasn't something that 8,000 other people have said, this is what's gonna happen next year. What do you, you know, what do you see as like, something that we're just kind of does not work anymore, or this is a whole new path that's gonna open up.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah, I don't know. It's probably is something that everybody's saying, but it just feels like everything's moving to be permission based. Like as a consumer. Control over everything. I don't need commercials. I don't have to watch your pre-roll. I don't have to absorb this thing unless I choose to do that. As a consumer, that excites me. As a marketer, that excites me. You know, I think it has implications across channels and tactics and businesses. It makes our job harder, but also more valuable and I think, you've created a successful business for yourself on this idea of content, but it's like marketing organizations are becoming media organizations. Like, our job is to create and make interesting things that people want to participate in and see and like, that's not gonna change. So I think this is like blending pop culture and media outlets and commercial interests, like all that stuff is evolving at such an interesting speed and pace. I certainly don't know how to predict where those things are going, but I think from a career standpoint, it's something that I certainly pay attention to. And I think if in your own career you're not thinking about how you can create things of value, right. That people wanna participate in. Yeah. You're not marketing, right? You're, you're just trying to schlep your wearers and that's not gonna go very far, much longer cuz people aren't gonna be forced to watch it.
Steve Goldhaber: I like it. Seth Godden would agree with you on the permission front that's core to his DNA there. We'll have Seth on the show too at a future date. Seth and Neil.
Steve Lafontaine: We'll get them, four of us get together .Over cocktails.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get super tactical. I'm gonna talk about technology now. What's a one or two pieces of technology that is newer that you're kind of like? This tool just helps me out, whether that saves me time or gives me new information. What do you like out there from a tools perspective
Steve Lafontaine: Without naming names?
Steve Goldhaber: You can name names on this one. Just you have to disclose an affiliate partnership.
Steve Lafontaine: No affiliation. I've recently been using Asana a lot as an organization is just a tool that I had. I know it's been around for a little while, but as a project management tool, you know, it's like any tool. It is what you make of it but it's one of those like, how did we ever go without a tool like this to keep ourselves organized? And if you're working within a larger department with a lot more people and even in a somewhat smaller department where you've got a lot of different sorts of moving pieces or plates, you're spinning. I think that type of sort of project management software can be super valuable. That's another piece of software that I use a lot. I recently signed up. I got a Feedly account, which is an RSS tool, that allows you to sort of, again, no affiliation, allows you to sort of categorize and bucket things your personal newsfeed with your work newsfeed or maybe an industry you're starting to pay attention to. And I've found that compared to Twitter is like your home on the internet, Feedly for me is becoming my home of the internet because it's a much more curated sort of article based feed. I've really enjoyed that recently.
Steve Goldhaber: I've done Feedly. It does a nice job of that. I feel like I'm fishing when I'm going out the feedly, meaning like I'm just setting a bunch of bobbers up on the lake and then stuff will attract. It's way in and I definitely like that. And I do like Asana too. Uh, I've used that for a little while and these tools like project management that have collaboration and document sharing built into them, it just cracks me up because when I got started in marketing, it was like Microsoft Project. You either used that or you didn't have a plan. And the functionality of Microsoft Project was like you created rows and tasks and milestones, and then like you all revisited this plan that some person took two weeks to create and like But when you into these platforms where there's just real time collaboration, it's just like there's nothing more satisfying on a project when you're watching something in Asana like just happen and you're just watching it. You're not even like engaging in it. These are the things that I should be seeing. I did see the asset email volumes tend to go down.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah, well it's it, and especially with so many people working from home and these remote teams now, like those types of tools, it'll be fun to pay attention to how they build on that. You see tools like Zoom or Slack adding functionality begging and borrowing because all of us want fewer tools, right? I don't want more tools. I want less tools, right? I want more consolidation of things. I want everything to be in one spot. I don't want to have to have these 10 different things I'm using at any one time. So how is Asana gonna do slack? Like instant messaging, right? They've already got some like email type functionality within their tools. So you can message around certain projects, but when are they gonna start doing video chat? You know, Slack's got a really nice video chat feature now within their tool. Where I don't need to launch Zoom, I can just do it right within Slack. You know that type of merger sort of platform play for some of these organizations will be fun to watch.
Steve Goldhaber: I'm amazed at the zoom and Otter integration. So Otter does voice dictation translation into transcripts. You now just feed your Zoom meeting that's recorded into the transcript. And with Otter, for example, you and I could have this whole conversation. You could say “penguin”, right? Like I remember him saying, telling me the penguin story. I go into otter, I type in the word penguin. It jumps down to the part of the meeting where you said, penguin and I just hit play. And you think about that, the ability within 10, 15 seconds to get in that precise. No, I remember you told me the penguin story and there was something in thereafter that I needed. Right. And it's the efficiency that kind of blows my mind.
Steve Lafontaine: I saw a company recently, I saw a company, they instagramed me. They literally, you can enter text and they have AI characters. That will read that text and create like promotional videos for you, right? So you can do a screen demo of your product and then have this talking head and it's pretty good, right? Like it's 90%?. Like if you're really paying attention and looking for it, you can tell it's kind of an AI generated thing. But between that and all the AI generated artwork that's floating around nowadays, the hardest thing as a marketer is to not buy new tools. Like, how do I not get drawn to this shiny thing, knowing that I'm gonna use it for a few months and then it's gonna disappear into my martech stack, never to be seen again.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. And then you need an app to manage all that. So you'll buy the app too, to manage all that.
Steve Lafontaine: Another quick one is that the designers out there are gonna be mad at me. But there are a lot of design as a service companies now, whereas with a small team you can pay a flat monthly rate to some of these organizations that have on staff designers. So you have your brand sort of in the software you submit a project 24 hours later you get a nicely designed PowerPoint or a one sheet that your sales team needed and it's wonderful for certain types of things. And when I was running a small team, it was invaluable to us cause we didn't have agency support. So I could pay 500 bucks or a thousand bucks a month for these guys to sort of always be on call for that type of stuff so that I didn't have to get into Illustrator and edit the document and that kind of thing. But I find a lot of value in those tools too.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. So we're gonna, we're gonna wrap it up. So I'm gonna end on one question and you can choose the question. This is a choose your adventure question. Either tell us about the best piece of marketing you've ever seen, you know, whether you were involved with it or someone marketed to you. That's question one. Question number two would be, what's the one thing that you see that is just a huge pet peeve where you may have to throw away your iPhone and buy a new one cuz it's just I'm gonna throw my phone at this thing if it happens again.
Steve Lafontaine: Oh man, that's a good one. I'll do the second one. I think prior to moving into B2B, I worked a little bit in the sort of event space, and some of that work involves working with celebrity personalities. And one thing that always scratches me the wrong or tickles me the wrong way, I guess I'll say, is when brands align themselves or partner with a personality or a celebrity. That has no earthly reason for existing. Why do you as a brand think that this person represents your brand other than name recognition? For some reason, that just always bothers me, like the perceived value of celebrity. Versus the actual value of celebrity, especially for like B2B organizations where there's just no earthly reason for those two brands to coexist and to be supporting each other. I think there's so much success in the B2C world with personalities and aligning with those types of folks. I think the B2B world has some evolution and some growing to do in that space and sort of intelligently aligning with personalities that have following calm influencers, whatever you want to call 'em. But when that's done wrong, I think it can be really messy and it just bothers me for whatever reason.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Awesome. Well, Steve, I enjoyed the conversation. It has been really good. I'm gonna ask everyone to continue to like and subscribe or if my kids are on the podcast they would use much cooler language like smash that subscribe button. I keep on dropping that with them and they're kind of like, dad, dude, it's just not cool. Stop. And I kind of have that proud dad moment where I'm embarrassing my kids by using their language . But anyway, thank you for joining me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Steve Lafontaine: Yeah, it was a pleasure, Steve. Thanks.