Listen Twice, Market Once

Marketers are annoying.
Our job is getting in people’s heads. So over time we we start to feel like we know everything (I do). But unless you’re Dr Doolittle or Mel Gibson in What Woman Want, you don’t. You really, really don’t.
In episode 20 (woot!) of Marketers in Capes, I talk to Joel Gaudeul, the CMO of Mention, a SaaS powerhouse that has helped the better part of a million marketers monitor better.
We discuss:

• Blended lifestyle social marketing (ie, your users are everywhere, why aren’t you
• What listening can drive (everything)
• How content and traction become a flywheel for distribution
• And more (but not so much more)

Not bad for under 9 minutes.

Episode Transcript

Eytan Buchman
Raise your hand if you’ve ever Googled your name. Keep it up high.

Don’t be embarrassed – everyone does it. And if you manage a brand, you probably Google that too. Sometimes multiple times a day, right?

And that’s what my guest today is going to deep dive on. But before I get there, I’m Eytan Buchman, you’re on the cutting edge of snarky marketing podcasts with Marketers in Capes, and I have two embarrassing admissions to make.

1. The first – I hate Googling competitor mentions because it bums me out when I see tire doing well. I’m kind of petty.
2. Way, way too often, I treat brand monitoring as a tool for health checks and to find press coverage about myself oro my brand. And that’s all.

In other words, I tune out the outside and focus on me.

Which is why I’m happy to introduce my guest today – Joel Gaudeul, the head of marketing at Mention. With over 750K registered contacts, Mention is probably synonymous with monitoring mentions. I reached out to Joel because I’ve been super curious about the role of social media monitoring in driving brand strategy. Especially on the B2B side. And here’s why it’s so important:

Joel Gaudeul
At Mention, we built a comprehensive tool to monitor every conversation online. It can be blogs news outlet, but also social media. Listening allows our users to understand what topics their audiences are taking part in. And when we talk about audiences, it can be people engaging with their content, their own media, but also users of competitors product, widows have a Reddit thread of fans have a Facebook page.

The most common use case our customer success team sees is around social listening for brand management. Typically, with this use case, we see companies and brands using for tool to identify important mentions about not only their brand, but also the online ecosystem. Meaning common topics, what phrases people and the list goes on. This insight can be for example, to a power user identify what their prospective clients are going to expand. Finding the next winning us at the race, making sure their providers respected MBAs or even identify include the fate products.

Eytan Buchman
Before we move on, I want you to look at the last copy you wrote. If it’s good, it probably says you or your, right? Talking from the customer’s frame of reference. Listening is the engine that makes that frame happen. But I’ve spend years using brand monitoring to listen to conversations about my brand mentions – basically listening to things about me – instead of listening to conversations in the space – listening to the customer. As a matter of fact, if you’re trying to get in your customers head, brand is probably the last keyword you should be tracking.

Joel Gaudeul
Listening to the conversion of your brand, competitors, and industry before joining the conversation. this is something that is applicable for both b2b and b2c. instead of trying to second-guess what to write about, or just adapting your SM strategy as yet another channel, accessing social media is a strength that has a strong impact on your brand.

Social media is where you can learn what the customers thinks about their challenges and day to day, not just about your brand.
But still, listening is only half the battle. Mention’s recently shifted to proactively supporting social media posting because they felt that the listening is what drives engagement. And more and more, that needs to take place on multiple channels.

the move we are making today by providing a full SM suite aims at fulfilling this vision. listening – to be in know and find the right content, spreading the word, and responding to the right message with the right question – Social Media should receive recognition as a disciple. There is no cookie cutter method here. Evident channels like LinkedIn are great for marketing for b2b. But reality is that Facebook and Instagram are reacting to blended lifestyle. This makes it complex but more doors. opens for content types and messaging to a single person.

Eytan Buchman
Blended lifestyle is the key here. If you’re an instagram junkie, when you see relevant posts about your job, you may like it, even if it’s not a 15 second Gif on how to make a Seitan Kale shake. The borders of work and home are blurrier than ever.

But let’s put the brakes on monitoring for a second. You may have heard me drop that Mention has over 750K users on their list. And I love the way they got there:

Joel Gaudeul
We work a bit on paid but have a focus on content. we don’t do straight acquisition – we try to promote content, esp through sponsored posts, also leverage blog with popup form, and added strategically located CTAs in top content and in our signature. in a click of a button, we can update emails with the latest marketing initiative.

Eytan Buchman
As I mentioned, this has already driven great traction for Mention, driving a ton of users. So they naturally evolved to comarketing:

Joel Gaudeul
in the last months, we have decided to accelerate content distribution through comarketing and partners. we feel hat we have reached a size of our brand that allows us to drive a strong audience and appeal to potential partners. every single marketing activity is matched against our ability to promote things with our partners – Hubspot, SemRush, and others. we also leverage our base of users (over 750K users) from the number of people trying our product every day. today,

Eytan Buchman
In my last episode, with Udi Ledergor from Gong, we discussed how whether someone would put money down for content is a good way to assess its quality. But here’s another benchmark – how usable is it throughout the entire customer journey?

Joel Gaudeul
it’s still limited to using our newsletter – editorial and product one – but tomorrow, we want this content to be distributed through out customer success and the product.

Eytan Buchman
The perfect social media guide works whether you’re a paying mention customer or a prospect, right?

Before we end, I want to make this a little more concrete.

Any elementary school teacher of mine would testify before congress that I suck at listening. But what I’ve recently found is that by replacing some content-creation time blocks with listening – recorded phone calls, chats, web engagement, and forums – the ideas flow way, way faster in the limited time I leave for content creation. Listening helps you talk…smarter.

Oh, and this is where I usually subtly beg you for an Apple Podcast review.

But I’m not going to do that. I’m better than that. What I will ask you for is for you to shoot me an email with your marketing hero, especially if they are a thought implementor, not a thought leader. I want them on this podcast.

My name is Eytan Buchman, this was the Big 20 episode of Marketers in Capes and now it’s time to listen….to the ending music.