With the quick consumption and fast-paced lives of consumers by the agency of digital accessibility of almost anything and everything, businesses gravitate towards templated and programmed responses and techniques. But is this the best marketing approach?
In this episode, Ethan Beute joins Steve Goldhaber as they share strategies and ways to approach B2B and B2C marketing that can promote opportunities for business growth.. Find out how personal trust and marketing service exceeds clickbaits and other social media hacks.
He also shares how writing a book and hosting podcasts generate consistent connection with clients and future prospects. Albeit their fun, rewarding and facile nature, real stories of real people make a powerful influence over thoughts and behaviors of readers and listeners, resulting in dramatic benefit to both the consumers and the company.
Tune in to learn how humanizing businesses impact the future of marketing.
Follow Ethan on LinkedIn and check out his books - Human-Centered Communication: A Business Case Against Digital Pollution and Rehumanize Your Business: How Personal Videos Accelerate Sales and Improve Customer Experience.
What You’ll Learn In This Episode:
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: Everyone, welcome to the show. We've got a great guest today. His name is Ethan Beute. He's the Chief Evangelist over at BombBomb, and he's also a wall street journal bestselling author. Ethan, welcome to the show.
Ethan Beute: Thanks so much, Steve. Really appreciate it. So glad you reached out and I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Give our audience a minute or two on your background and maybe how you got started in marketing.
Ethan Beute: Sure. So, I, as everybody is a marketer because I just found myself there at some level. I didn't set out to do it, I guess that's not the way everyone does it, but I spent about a dozen years in broadcast television, running, marketing inside, like your local NBC or ABC or Fox station. I did that in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I did it in Chicago and out here where I am now in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And I got pretty bored of the work. So I was working on an MBA. I started doing project work with a variety of different people that I knew who needed to work, done to explore, like, what will people pay me for? What do I actually like doing, what skills are transferable, et cetera. And I ended up doing some work with the two co-founders of BombBomb. And so I got to know them and what they were trying to do very, very early on, really, even before go-to market. And, I just really appreciated them to a certain point.
It just made sense for me to join the team. It was a company that had almost no paying customers and almost no employees. And so it was pretty big, pretty big risk at the time, but my wife was supportive. It was the right thing to do. And here I am a decade later. And the most fun thing about that transition for me was the intersection of being joined at the hip with sales as a B2B marketer.
Because before, essentially my work was in B2C, like building an audience among all the people that live in a community through television. And so this idea of being joined at the hip with sales and really partnering with them to create success, as well as having very direct relationships with customers, this idea of like, I can just reach out and talk to my customers, whatever I want.
That was something that didn't exist for me, except perhaps through social media when I was on television. And so, I really enjoy it. I love it. I have personal relationships with hundreds and hundreds of our customers. It's been a joy and it's why I stay, I guess. The last thing I'll share is that for anyone who finds themself at the intersection of fun, interesting and challenging work, you're in a good spot.
And this has continued to be that for me, which is why I continue to participate in what this organization's trying to do.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's interesting. I also started with the B2C background and that was one of those things where you would only interact if you did research, social media was not around yet when I was just starting my career. But we had a call center and you could listen into phone calls and see what was going on, but that is a great thing about B2B, you're never at a lack of just someone who will talk to you about what their issues are or how, or how they wanna get better at something.
So I totally agree. Okay, let's jump into the storytelling part of the podcast. So the first story that you've got, I mentioned as your intro, you've written a book. We have that in common, I've written one book. I think you've surpassed me on that. Not like the number of books as any, credentials to put anywhere, but we share that same process.
So tell us the first story about how you, how you got into the book.
Ethan Beute: Sure. I was, I hit my six year full-time anniversary at BombBomb, and I got well up with what I'll call a healthy pride, like pride can be bad, but I felt like this was, this was like when I started, we all had almost no paying customers.
This idea of people using video, not just on YouTube or on their website or in social, but this idea of sending video in a direct message to one person or five people, or even 500 people was something that didn't really exist in 2011. That's why the, that's why the two co-founders legally founded the company in ‘06 is back when they tried to start doing this and just didn't exist.
And so we're really creating something. That doesn't exist in an ‘06 or sorry, after my six year anniversary, we were maybe at 30,000 customers or so, and some of our early phase competitors had already kind of fallen off and actually shut down or become functionally irrelevant. They weren't finding a way to make it work.
And so I’m just really proud of how far we have come, not just as a team and a company, but really as a broader community of people who identified that there was an opportunity to be more clear and more personal and more human in their daily communication and are actively engaged in this. We had a super engaged customer base.
So I wrote a blog post called “You are a Pioneer” with this vision of, one day tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people will be doing this. It'll be as normal as typing out an email. It's like, “oh, I actually, I should probably send a video here instead.” That's my hope and vision is what is part of what continues to drive me.
So I wrote this blog post and I didn't feel like it was enough. So I just started outlining and writing it as a book to normalize this behavior. And from a B2B marketing perspective, reach people that we weren't currently reaching. Certainly it's a referable product. Someone receives a video master, you're like, “oh, that's cool. How did you do that?”
Steve Goldhaber: Right.
Ethan Beute: So there's kind of inherently remarkable quality to the experience as a recipient, but we were still like, “how do we reach people that we aren't reaching now?” And I thought like a mainstream business book, I read a ton of them, would be a good way to do that.
So I just started writing it and then a friend of mine in publishing was like, “Hey, is this your book? Or is this a BombBomb book?” And I was like, “I don't know.”
Steve Goldhaber: Let's talk about that. So blurry a blurry area, right? We all, we all kind of go up, I dunno what.
Ethan Beute: Yeah. So I had to build a whole business model around it.
I pitched it internally. There's a lot of excitement. I identified Wiley and then Greenleaf, which is kind of a hybrid self-publisher. Wiley is a very traditional publisher. As the two preferred options, we ended up going with Wiley.
They suggested I get a coauthor, so that was my long time friend and team member in our CMO here, Steve Pasinelli and it was a fantastic partnership and it was really good for us. It ignited the group of people that we were trying to keep engaged, to keep this movement moving. But we released it in spring of 2019, I still get messages consistently and regularly from people who find it, pick it up, someone gave it to them, whatever. And they wanna talk about it from a business perspective.
I know that we did at least four or five solid for us - like multi-seat deals, like good multi seat deals that more than covered the costs of, by the way, for anyone listening, you don't make a lot of money doing a book it really is a marketing play above all. Unless you get really lucky with something like Atomic Habits that just catches fire.
You're generally not gonna make much money on a book. So, what we were looking for is can we reach new people? And we've had several people reach out and say, “I saw your book at the airport as I was heading to LA. And so I read it coast to coast in one flight and it was amazing and so now I'm reaching out” and then that turns into a customer. So it's been fun and interesting and we've since done it again.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You had a blog post on your kind of journey on that. And we did one thing in common - at the beginning of the book, instead of jumping too far deep into it, you just talk to people and you say, “what'd you do it in, how long did it take?”
And it was funny to read the different angles of like, you had one example where someone knocked it out in a week, other people like it took a long time. So it's, it's funny how everyone's got a different journey in writing a book. And I think, to your point, a deadline is always helpful and that's what Wiley gave to you, that's certainly the great thing about publishing partners. That's where you're kinda like “uhoh, that they're in charge of this thing.”
Ethan Beute: Yeah. I have a contractual obligation. You know, versus one day I'll get this finished and it's up to me to decide when that is.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The other thing too that’s interesting about writing a book is you have people come up to you, you don't know anything about them, yet they've invested four or five hours reading the book. And they just had this vocabulary and example set with them where you just share all this knowledge and it's always weird to me for people to repeat a story to me.
And I'm like, how do you know this story? They’re like, “Oh, it's in the book.” It's just funny how the book is the ultimate content marketing piece because you're educating people to your point. It is a marketing tool, right? So it's turning you into someone with a very shiny business card and I've found that it does help stand out.
It's easy to throw a business card away, someone will eventually throw your book away. But I feel like there's this obligation that for a week or two, it has to sit out, they'll have to at least acknowledge the book.
Ethan Beute: Yeah, it's really interesting. And again, I'll just double back on something I said off the top, and I'm sure you'll identify with it too, is that you're what you can do digitally between advertising, retargeting, sponsoring other people's events and things like that, like that you have a reach digitally, but there's something wonderful and interesting and unique and old fashioned about taking all of your best stories, I think I mentioned 35 or 40 different customers specifically in the book.
So it was written in the first person, but reflected what real people other people were doing as well. But you put it on paper, with ink, it's just like this old fashioned physical, tangible analog thing. And yet it's doing this reach, and it's creating this experience that just isn't created digitally.
Do I agree? I think it belongs in the mix for anyone who has the capacity to get that done.
Steve Goldhaber: The other thing too, like I started before I did my book, I did a lot of publishing through LinkedIn. And one thing that I felt like when I was writing for LinkedIn, I published on my personal account and also I was like a guest author for their own blog, but the challenge for me was if you're not so attention grabbing and almost salacious with headlines and lists that you're gonna lose someone's attention. And what I really enjoyed about writing a book was once someone is picking up a book to read it, I just envisioned them in a chair like relaxing.
Because of that, I felt like better content was produced because I wasn't always so concerned about specific language or keeping it like, “Hey, if I don't shock someone with something or tell an amazing story, they're gone in 30 seconds.” So it helped me really mellow out as a writer.
Ethan Beute: Yeah. And you get to go deep, in a way that in general, to your observation, people just not enough people have the patience for.
Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. Well, I like that story. Thank you for sharing that one. We're gonna jump into the second story you've got this is a little bit more of a contemporary version of marketing or content marketing. So tell us about starting a podcast. What's it like?
Ethan Beute: Yeah. Several of us here at BombBomb are avid podcast listeners. So it seemed inevitable that we would do it. And I landed in it by doing something fun, that’s just for fun myself which is, I think five times now, I've reached out to the host of a podcast I appreciate, invited myself to host them on their show as a guest. So I'll take over the host role, you on your own show are now the guest and several people took me up on it. And so I did that with Sangram Vajre, who at the time was a co-founder and Chief Evangelist at Terminus.
And he was kind enough to say, “Hey, that's a fun idea.” I mean, I proposed that we talk about his title, Chief Evangelist and he was kind enough to turn that around on me and say, “Great idea. Sounds fun. Happy to do it, but if you find three more, I'll run it as a four part series once a week for a month.”
So I knew Dan Steinman at Gainsight who was an early team member there and, and a Chief Evangelist. He was also involved in making some introductions to me at Wiley. So, shout out to Dan, appreciate him. And, cold reached out to Dave Isbitski on LinkedIn. At the time, he was the Chief Evangelist of Alexa and Echo at Amazon.
I reached out with a video message and he immediately responded and said yes. I thought that was a pretty good get for someone who's got a bigger project, like on the fly. And then I decided I had to go for the original Chief Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. He was on a small, like product evangelist team at Apple left over kind of like a little dispute with some decisions that were being made and then got hired back by Steve Jobs as their first and only ever Chief Evangelist.
So I found a random email address on one of his multiple websites. It was something like guykawasaki@gmail.com, or guy@guykawasaki.com and sent him a video message, letting him know what I was trying to do, and that I would love to have him. And I was able to lean on the credibility of Sangram's show, which at that time was like 350 episodes deep, you know?
It wasn't this kind of one off thing and I didn't get a reply for like two weeks. But because we track the video plays and the email opens when you use BombBomb inside Gmail, I could see the email got opened like 18 or 20 times and the video got played like 12 or 14 times.
So I knew something was happening, but I was kind of anxious and I did like one or two kind of follow ons. Like, “Hey, you just wanted to make sure you had a chance to take a look at this.” I eventually got a reply back from someone in publicity at Penguin Random House and fortunately for me, he was about to release a memoir and he was agreeing to do publicity. So I got him too.
I ran that as a series and ended up writing up 10 things that I learned from those four Chief Evangelists. Steve, my CMO, who I mentioned earlier was like, “This is awesome. Sounds like we need a Chief Evangelist. Sounds like you're the right person for that.”
So as we started developing what we wanted to do, a podcast was just a natural thing because the podcast was to start the conversation. We all listened to podcasts. And then I knew James Carver at Sweet Fish Media, and he had written a book about content based networking. It was his language for the power of what we're doing now, Steve, which is connecting and communicating on relevant topics professionally but in conversation. Like at some level of depth that you don't get in a drive by a LinkedIn post, right? Someone listening to this, isn't listening for 30 seconds. They wanna hear real stories and get to know real people. And you and I get to know each other a little bit too.
So this idea of using a podcast in an account based motion where you're trying to build relationships in particular accounts, get to know your ideal customers at some level of depth and then at the same time, you're creating a ton of content, and taking some leadership position on the key themes that the podcast is based around.
It's something I've been doing for over three years now, and it's been one of the most fun and rewarding things I've done in my career, period. I would hope that you've experienced the same.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it is fascinating. I mean, it's kind of like you're just having a cup of coffee with someone, you put more research into it and there's more production logistics, but it really just gets down to talking to people. How long did it take you on the podcast? Like, to me, I'm always in that tech stack mode of like figuring out how to do it. And I've got an assistant who helps me produce the actual show. So I don't do nearly all the work that she does. But do you feel like you're in that constant state of just trying to figure out from the publishing side of the podcast? Am I doing it right? Can I do it more efficiently? What’s your take?
Ethan Beute: Yeah. I mean, we did end up hiring Sweet Fish to get some production done. So like you, I have a lot of assistance on it, but I I'll say I'll share two things around that. The first is that the growth in listenership and streaming streams and downloads, which by the way, is only part of the story.
It's the easiest thing to measure, but it's probably the least interesting thing about the podcast journey. I just shared recently some research that I found in Harvard Business Review, and then read a couple more articles on it, about the power of being in someone's earbuds, even compared to being over their speakers in terms of affecting their thoughts, affecting their behavior, et cetera, this is a very intimate format.
The streams and downloads matter, but it really is about sticking with it. The growth on the show that I host was about 120% from year one to year two. So when I compared it quarter to quarter and month to month, From the first year to the second year is about 120% growth overall, doubled the growth from year two to year three was 220%.
It grew, so there's something about sticking with it and learning more, going deeper, constantly refining it. Gosh, I don't remember how dramatically different I was doing things on a week to week basis, say two or two and a half years ago. But yes. I mean, it's every week, the show that I hosted. So you constantly have opportunities to learn and grow and improve.
I guess if I was gonna offer one tip to someone who was thinking about doing this or who is early in their journey of it - because I think it is a very, very powerful thing to do for any B2B marketer, whether they host it or whether they support it internally that someone else is hosting it - is to go for the known quantity. Guy Kawasaki’s right. The guy that was at Apple, the guy that now is the Chief Evangelist at Canva, he's written like 12 or 14 books, a true thought leader in kind of modern marketing in general. You wanna go, but he's never gonna share it, right? I'm not gonna publish the episode and he's gonna put it up on his social media that has like a hundred X or thousand X my following. So it's finding this sweet spot of like real practitioners with real stories to share who are not so big, that they won't share it, but not so small that they're sharing it doesn't add, doesn't increase the reach of the show. It's like finding the sweet spot of people who have some real stories to share blended with, they actually have invested in.
You know, growing a voice, developing their voice, growing a community, having some influence because the growth of the show is very much related to your guests, sharing the show.
Steve Goldhaber: It's interesting. We've talked about a book and a podcast, which seems completely ridiculous to even entertain that idea in this world of short form, quick consumption. And it's almost funny, it's kind of like the Zig and the Zag thing. Like everyone's going to like short form content and the stuff that I've seen most effective is just longer form.
And I think it's that old thing where it's like, even if a hundred people start listening to something and 50 of them maybe bail halfway through, or, 20 end up finishing a 45 minute episode, you've got those people for the entire time and the relationship that you're building, whether it's in a book or a podcast for those small people, I mean, that's hard to measure. Someone's not gonna watch a 40 minute social media post, like there is no 40-minute social post.
Ethan Beute: Right. I guess that's another tip to add on. One thing I do is I cut video clips out. I shoot for 45 seconds to two minutes and 15 seconds cuz that's the Twitter limit of a video clip. So, I share short pieces that do stand alone.
You could spend a minute and a half with somebody and still learn something, “But oh, by the way, I've got eight other things that this person teaches and it's all linked up right down below.” I guess that’s one thing I'll share, especially if your addressable market is narrow.
B2B marketing is pretty broad. We have a B2C motion within our business, but we also are doing six figure deals as well, so someone listening to this show may have a total addressable market of a million different companies.
Maybe it's still a B2B motion, although it maybe acts like B2C at some level, or, some of our customers have 500 companies that they wanna be in business with and they wanna be in deep. And so, those 30-second drive-by things are not that useful. If your goal is to get to the VP or S VP or the C-suite level inside one of 500 companies.
If you can get inside two of them as a salesperson or a marketer within a six month period, you're doing great and you're providing massive value to the organization. So, don't fall into the trap of like the hack and the best practice or whatever, do things of substance.
In order to serve the people you're trying to be in a relationship with, trust that it's going to work out. Pay attention to what's working and what isn't of course, but, I really appreciate your observation about depth and I'll just share one last thing - I saw a piece published pretty recently, it is a broad survey of like 500 executives, I think it included VP and above, and what they were looking for in thought leadership and in content marketing. The key that I took out of reading this like a four page report was provocative, they want their assumptions provoked. They wanna think differently about what's going on in the world.
And you're not necessarily gonna do that in three sentences. I think there's a big echo chamber on a lot of social, especially on LinkedIn, but if you really want to provoke thought and generate conversations with key decision makers in a more limited B2B motion, you really can't afford to do anything less than something of substance in depth. And you're just not gonna do that if you're focused on the drive by click bait stuff.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Great points. All right. Let's jump into story number three. This is a little bit more of a product thing, and this is directly from your experience at BombBomb. So take it away. Story number three.
Ethan Beute: Sure. We were, like a lot of companies at an early stage, we had a really powerful idea. We were getting positive feedback on it. We had some customers, but we didn't have what most people would regard as product market fit. We didn't know the best way to really go to market. What we offer, almost anyone working professionally can benefit from the service that we provide, but you can't go to market that way. You're just not gonna get any traction.
So we got a little bit of momentum and a particular vertical, we committed to it, like almost all of our discretionary time and money. We continued to take on all kinds of different businesses. But we invested, for about three years, all of our discretionary time and money into one particular vertical, and ended up picking up a second vertical that works a lot with those folks as well.
So this is a really tight ecosystem and we reached a point where, like so many companies, when you're considering whether we go up market. We were serving SMB, like in VSB, very small business and SMB. So most of our big accounts at the time were like, “we'd have 35 or 40 seats inside an 8,000 person company.”
So we could say that we were doing upmarket work, but we really weren't. We had like one small. So it really was like a VSB SMB thing. And so as we were looking at different ways to grow revenue as every company, most companies want to, ARR. Seat more average contract value, I guess is another way to express. That is one of the levers that you can look at. So we initially focused on these people that we got to know very, very well in these two particular verticals and developed, it was like a two month program that they could get involved in and it cost four times more than their annual subscription to our software.
Which we felt like was a little bit of a leap, but we sold out the first class and ended up doing it like eight or nine times. I mean, we generated a ton of revenue with that and for a bootstrapped organization, it was super helpful to launch these events as a marketing team, to launch and deliver the service cuz this huge immediate cash infusion but you immediately learn.
Well, now we gotta start over and do it again. So we figured out “how do we, how do we make this recur?” So we started again, going back into deep relationship with our existing customers to learn more about problems that we could solve within the scope of what we wanted to do as an organization and developed a completely new product that was about two and a half each customer's average spend with us, created a lot of momentum, teased it out for about four or five months, did a big launch where we invited people onto sessions. Like, “if you wanted access to know about the details of the product and have access to buy it, you had to attend one of these live sessions.”
So, it gave us the opportunity to really, I hate the word control, but like kind of control the story, control the narrative and make sure people truly understood the value. And I'll turn this into a quick B2B tip, truly understanding the value before they had access to it and saw the price and everything else.
And so turning that, what we learned from the one time revenue play into a recurring revenue product, was a really smart play. But this idea of just letting people make their own decisions without having a dramatic influence on how they understand the value. Like if you leave it exclusively, I think so many people wanna go to a self-service motion, even in B2B. And we tell ourselves that we don't need humans here because humans are expensive and no one wants to talk to a human.
Anyway, I would just suggest that you're giving away the most powerful way to connect with and influence someone else to help them understand why things are the way they are, ideally through a discovery diagnosis, prescription motion. We don't always have that privilege, but if we had just tried to launch this product, that was two and a half to three times the price of all these customers' current subscription. And by the way, we launched it to our existing customers first, so that we could develop the product and really understand what they truly loved about it beyond our initial research, before we went to the market at large. So we knew how to position it as marketers.
If you don't give yourself that opportunity to communicate the value, but you try to make your arguments on a landing page, you try to make your arguments with emails, you try to make it clear to people. But by forcing people who already trust you and like you into a closed environment where you can create this conversation, I feel like it was a much more powerful launch as a consequence.
And that was like a seven figure launch window for us over a three week window, that was a dramatic benefit to us as a company. Mostly because it was a benefit to our customers.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I like that story.
Ethan Beute: I think one thing I wanna point out is you made the decision to say, look, let's focus on one, maybe two verticals.
I see so many B2B marketers - it's kind of what I'll call vertical commitment, fear where as soon as you advise someone to focus on one or two vertical, all they can think about is like, if I do that, I'm just ruling out 90% of the marketplace, which, which is of course, yes, that's what you're doing. But what they don't always appreciate is when you market to just one vertical, all your marketing becomes easier and your conversion rates are way, way higher because the introduction into your prospecting and sales process is all about, “we understand your pain”. We understand how to solve these problems. Here are examples of other customers in the same vertical. Who've already been through what you've gone through. And I just feel like it's less classical marketing and more true marketing as a service.
I’ve always found once you make that distinction into a vertical, you're closing faster. People trust you faster. It's the people who know and trust you, you can sell them other things pretty easily. Cuz they'll just go, “All right. I like your company. I like you individually. Sure. I'll give it a shot.”
But the people who don't know anything about you, you gotta hit that vertical angle. And I just have always found that that's way more productive. I love that observation. And I just wanna double down on the fear that these people have, cuz we've, we've gone through phases of that ourselves.
It will get swung back against you. You know? I mean, we, I feel like we established and pioneered this space that has now attracted hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital. Not that we have any of it, but people would say, oh, they're just for these people. Or they're just for those people. And of course, at max, when we were fully invested all of our, as I said, all of our discretionary time and money, if we were gonna pay to sponsor an event, it was in this industry. If we are going to develop content, we do one version for them. And one version for everybody else, it was like a pretty significant commitment.
And even at that point, it only reached like 50% of our total inbound flow. So if you can serve multiple verticals, you'll continue to take business elsewhere, but your primary message, your lead foot, the way that you're expressing yourself is really in lockstep with these people that you can serve the best and be prepared for other competitors to try to use that against you.
But the core idea that we followed was “We can go into any vertical we want in the future. Whenever we feel prepared to do that, but let's establish a beachhead here that is impenetrable, because nobody else is doing for this industry what we are doing.”
No one understands this industry the way that we understand them, no one has the depth of relationships in this industry that we have. So it becomes this kind of a beachhead scenario from which you could do what you just suggested, Steve, which is to develop more products and services. That's based on the third story I shared or, launch into other related verticals and help, broaden out inside the ecosystem that those people are already operating in because no one vertical is locked in and of itself.
These verticals interact with one another. And as I already said, we pick up a second vertical just as our consequence of a commitment to the one. There are multiple ways to go from it, but I can totally understand the sphere of commitment and I would double down on what you said, Steve, don't be afraid of it. It's only going to give you more power and more focus.
Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. Good stories. All right. We're gonna jump into the next part of the show, which is the get to know deep dive and you've already mentioned that you did not know that you wanted to do marketing. It just kind of happened. And you shared a little bit about your earlier career on the broadcast side.
So when was it that it really kind of clicked for you and, and it said, “What? Marketing is my thing. I like the challenges, the fun of whether it's communicating something or getting someone to buy something.” When was it that it hit you? Like, “I think this is my thing.”
Ethan Beute: It was definitely in my first television job where I was a writer, producer and editor internally and it was just the ability to take input from multiple sources, process those distill to essence, like try to understand what is the most interesting, valuable, compelling, remarkable angle to this thing that I'm trying to create awareness or understanding or behavior around. And then turning it into a little thing is the creative aspect of it too, because I came in right at the onset of non-linear editing. Anyone that knows like iMovie or final cut pro or Adobe premiere that didn't exist when I started my career. Not on your laptop or your local machine, you had to buy an array, like a raid array to store all the media and all of this other stuff. But it was at the point where you no longer needed someone to run the audio board and someone to run all the source material.
And you sit back on the couch as a producer and tell people what you want. You got to just go in there, close the door and ingest all of your video, all of your audio, your graphics, the narration, the sound effects, et cetera, and create this piece that emotionally and intellectually moves people to some thought or action.
Then the next layer was you start doing it against market research, not just the person that you're creating this on behalf of, it fills out a creative brief and suggests what they think is important. You ask some follow up questions and just go off that.
Now you're working off market research, which was the best we had, in a more of a B2C motion, kind of generalized observations about the market at large and some of the strategy around that. And then going into the work from the raw market insight, to developing the strategy to then bringing it down to the piece by piece layer and building campaigns across web ads, across print ads, across audio ads, across cable ads. Of course we had our own massive communication voice as a broadcast entity. So it was in that first job at the Fox station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that I was like, this is for me. I love this. It's creative. It's challenging. It's about people. It's the intersection of psychology and communication. I love it.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, there is such a psychological thing with marketing. And I think what I also enjoy about it is there's not a clear answer and even four different answers may solve the problem. But it's kind of fascinating that as much as there are best practices and tips, everything forward looking is very different.
You're kind of gambling to some extent, you don't really know for sure you can repeat. But if you're looking at a totally new marketplace, it's kind of like, I like the unknown part of it, you know? Okay. We've talked about all the great things about marketing.
I'm gonna flip it around on you now, the downside of being a marketer. So imagine yourself, you're going through your inbox or you're getting phone calls and you're just. You know what I can't handle this anymore, this marketing approach or this person they're driving me nuts. What are some things that, as a marketer where you're like, I can't handle these fails anymore. Let's just try to abolish them.
Ethan Beute: Um, I'll share two. One of them. I'm sure almost everyone listening can relate to that, it's very specific and personal to me because of the nature of my role that maybe, some of you will identify with, or it's at least a caution as you go down this road.
So the one thing everyone can identify with is that so many people think they can do marketing, right? Because everyone interacts with marketing messages. Everyone watches some video content, whether that's through a streaming service broadcast, whatever everyone interacts with web ads, or at least sees them. Everyone sees social media marketing. Everyone is familiar with or reads books. Everyone thinks that they can do marketing because they have some exposure to it. So every individual has to interact with all these things and make decisions around it. Sometimes you make observations around it, sometimes you talk to other people about it. It's certainly been a cultural component.
My entire life is talking about marketing and advertising, new campaigns and new interactive structures for campaigns and things. Um, and it's not just because I'm in the business. I talk about this with family members who don't have any interest at all in marketing as a profession. And so I think the bottom line it's everyone thinks they can do marketing because everyone has some familiarity with and interacts with marketing materials and marketing delivery. But marketing is so much more than what you see at the end of it.
For so many reasons. And I think we'd probably spend 45 minutes just talking about that topic. The one that's personal is I am a very forward facing person. I was the only marketer at BombBomb for several years. Every newsletter, every special offer, all of the onboarding webinars, all of the blog content, all of the social, I was producing all of it.
My name was on it and because we're a video organization, my face was on all of it too. And so, and now in an evangelist position, it's even more so, but it's now a decade deep. Hundreds of thousands of people have my personal email address. And by the way, it's just Ethan, ethan@bombbomb.com and I've connected with tons of people on social.
So I am very often the first point of contact when someone has a problem or a question. I personally handle them, and I actually appreciate the opportunity, but in my weaker moments or on bad days, I'm like, the last thing I need is a customer confusion, customer complaint, whatever, because I take so much of it personally.
You want to have that level of intimacy. It's a privilege of being in B2B marketing, especially again, with a more limited market size. We don't have that. Like again, we have I think 90,000 active users right now. And so many of them have access to me and it's easier to find me than it is to go to the website to find the contact page and figure the appropriate route.
It's like, “oh, I know that dude at BombBomb.” And so I wind up, receiving and either directly responding to, or routing a lot of things. And sometimes it feels like a distraction, especially on busy days or days when I'm kind of stressed out or days when I'm still trying to find my own joy or place in that day or in that moment when it's timed the wrong way and the spirit is wrong and someone's really angry or frustrated, it can really drag me down.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. I hear you on that. All right. So, a couple more questions. The next one is, we'll get tactical here. In the marketing tech stack world, besides BombBomb, of course, what is your favorite tool? Whether it's for productivity or analytics. What's something that you've been turned onto in the last year or two where you're like “thank God for this tool. I love it.”
Ethan Beute: Oh, last year or two. Well, now you just kind of hemmed me in a little bit. I have a couple of go-tos. I just wanna double down on video messaging. If you are trying to get people to fill out a survey, if you are trying to get people to agree, to do a customer interview, if you want people to feel like they matter to you in your organization, stop relying exclusively on faceless, typed out text and find a video messaging tool and at least experiment with it.
Say thank you. Good job. Congratulations. I've been thinking about you. Thank you for your time, they can be simple stuff, but this idea of you being present with someone asynchronously is super, super powerful. And we could spend 45 minutes just on marketing use cases, product marketing use cases we could do at least 20 minutes on anyway. So that's one I was gonna go to, I guess, since you set BombBomb on the side, and there are a number of providers, by the way, I wanna be fair to everybody. I just think more people should be doing this.
So if you don't like us or the way we're priced or styled, give someone else a look, but this is worth doing period. I want it to be normalized behavior. Calendly, I've been using it for more than two years probably, but I interact with a lot of people online. And when the office shut down at the onset of the pandemic years ago, this opportunity to connect with people that I had only known through social media became a thing. And just having a Calendly link or multiple Calendly links for a variety of things is insanely helpful. It's just so productive. I love it.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome.
Ethan Beute: And it's cheap.
Steve Goldhaber: That is true. The efficiency, I mean, I use Calendly for a while now. You gotta get good at blocking personal time or work time that you don't want access.
So I think you've gotta really actively manage it. Cuz sometimes when I started using it I was like, “all right, awesome. Three new meetings.” And I'm like, “oh, I don't wanna meet.” Then I am doing something else. So you gotta really guard yourself.
Ethan Beute: So that's the secondary benefit. Same thing for me, like, I kind of used my calendar. Like I would use it reasonably well, but once I started opening my calendar up for the podcast and for the, some of these kind of one-on-one like learning, get to know you. What's a potential partnership situation, types of meetings. It immediately made me more focused on how I was structuring my day and when I should be blocking my calendar.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah.
Ethan Beute: It really brought me to a new level of relationship with my calendar.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I mean, I've got to a point where I could sometimes say for this type of a meeting, I wanna do it on Thursday between, nine in the morning to one. And if I put a link out there far enough, everyone would kind of neatly follow that path. And I would say, great, I can knock out four meetings back to back. And then I would have half a day left. So instead of like spraying your meetings throughout the entire day, when you can do that, it feels like a big win, cuz you're not just cut. You're not just back and forth with meetings.
Yeah. It can be really powerful. All right. So before we head out, I want to thank you for being here today. And I also want you to give a plug for both your books. And your podcast. So I wanna make sure everyone has access to it. We'll include it in the show notes.
Ethan Beute: Awesome. Thank you so much, Steve. And I'll do a shout out to another podcast as well, ‘cause I think it'd be useful for a lot of B2B marketers. So the podcast I host is called The Customer Experience Podcast. It's just at bombbomb.com/podcast or The Customer Experience Podcast in all the podcasts places, wherever you're listening to this. You can also find that I also love the marketing book podcast. Sometimes I don't read books because I just listen to an hour long interview with the author of these B2B sales and marketing books. And sometimes I will read a book because of the interview. Other times I will have read the book and now I wanna go deeper.
So, if you like the podcast format, which you obviously do, if you're listening at this point to this conversation and you like books, which is something we already talked about, Marketing Book Podcast by Douglas Burett is fantastic. And as for the books, the first book that I wrote is called Rehumanize Your Business: How Personal Videos Accelerate Sales and Improve Customer Experience. That one was by Wiley. We released that in spring of 2019.
And then the more recent book we did with fast company press, that one is called Human-Centered Communication: A Business Case Against Digital Pollution. that one released again, fast company press in October of 2021. And you can find both of those on Amazon or at bombbomb.com/book. Or anywhere else that you look for books.
Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. All right. Thanks everyone for joining. And thank you again, Ethan for a really insightful show. Take care. Thank you.