We welcome back Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing and a leading voice in the industry. Four years after his last appearance, Joel shares how B2B marketing has evolved – impacted by COVID, political tensions, AI, and tariffs.
From the lasting power of podcasts to the shifting balance between brand and performance marketing, he explores the rise of human-centric strategies in B2B, the real impact of AI on MarTech, and why trust, influence, and advocacy are emerging as the new pillars of marketing success.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About B2B Marketing
B2B Marketing is the premier provider of insight and intelligence for marketers across all B2B sectors. Its Propolis community intelligence platform helps marketing teams become more effective and successful. The B2B Marketing Awards are the gold standard for excellence in B2B campaigns, while Ignite and the Global ABM Conference are among the most respected events on the B2B marketing calendar.
B2B Marketing’s offerings include an extensive content portfolio, such as the B2B Agencies Benchmarking Report, the B2B Marketing Podcast, and a suite of industry-focused training courses.
About Joel Harrison
Joel Harrison has spent over 20 years at the heart of the B2B marketing industry — as an editor, keynote speaker, ambassador, and evangelist — playing a pivotal role in shaping the dynamic sector we know today.
Today, Joel focuses on podcasting, public speaking, advisory work, and his upcoming book on thought leadership. He co-founded B2B Marketing magazine in 2004, establishing key industry events and the Propolis community. He remains co-owner and director of B2B Marketing (www.b2bmarketing.net), though he is no longer operationally involved.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 – Guest Introduction: Joel Harrison
00:00:44 – What Has Joel Been Doing Over the Last 4 Years?
00:02:54 – The Future of Podcasts
00:06:28 – Creating Valuable Conferences
00:08:40 – How Has the B2B Marketing Landscape Changed?
00:12:30 – Making B2B Marketing Less Boring
00:16:30 – The Impact of AI on the Marketing Stack
00:18:29 – The Rise of Influencer Marketing in B2B
00:24:20 – Best Marketing Advice and Career Tips
Quotes
“In the 22 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a period that even compares remotely.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“The only thing you can be certain about is uncertainty.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“B2B marketing has definitely got more human. And that’s a good thing.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“AI isn’t the reason to buy a platform. The platform should solve a specific job — AI is just part of how it does it.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“We can’t really envisage what the midterm future looks like right now — we’re just so early in the AI journey.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“It’s not about being boring or not boring — it’s about being human and relevant.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
Follow Joel:
Joel Harrison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/
B2B Marketing’s website: https://www.b2bmarketing.net/
B2B Marketing on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2b-marketing/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Joel Harrison at B2B Marketing
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Joel Harrison
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today,
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier today, I’m joined by Joel Harrison, who’s the founder of B2B marketing and probably one of the best known voices in B2B marketing as a whole. Welcome to the podcast again, Joel.
Joel: It’s love to be back. Mike, can’t believe it’s been four years.
Mike: Yes, it’s been four years since we last talked in the podcast. Do you want to tell us you know a little bit about what you’ve been doing and what’s been happening at B2B Marketing and Propolis?
Joel: Well, I guess four years ago was kind of early stage COVID, right? Like that. So yeah, the business, our businesses, um, business, BT, marketing as a business, has been through a lot of change in that period of time. We launched Propolis about four years ago, I think we launched in 2000 Oh, one, and we launched what we launched what we launched as minimum viable product, and it’s evolved an awful lot since then. It’s much more sophisticated and rich and and it’s proving a massive success in parallel with that. You know, many people listen to this may know me from, you know, having launched B2B marketing magazine and then post magazine, we still had a kind of positioning as a voice of the industry that’s kind of retrenched a bit as from the brand’s perspective, and it has become very much focused around Propolis, which is a closed community for B2B marketers, a really valuable community, and it’s proving really successful for its members. And then also the events as well, like the Ignite and the baby ABM conference and the BQ marketing awards. So we do less as a brand, as a business. We do less of those things, those kind of market outreach things. Well, personally, I’ve actually stepped back operationally from the business, and I’m finding time to do a lot more of those things myself, and be out in the market, going to events. I’ve got my own podcast as well, and then doing all kinds of things like that. So a slight kind of realignment in terms of, personally, how I’m involved in what I’m doing.
Mike: And that sounds quite exciting. I mean, you’ve always been, you know, one of those voices talking about what’s happening in B2B marketing and where the industry is going. I mean, presumably that’s really playing to the areas that you enjoy.
Joel: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of like getting back my job as an old magazine editor again, except without the crushing production designs, so and also new set of tools to play with, so things like podcasting and video, which are really, really interesting, and social channels as well. So it is great. It’s good fun. And I get to be agile. And I had, I’ve had spent, I’ve spent 22 years everyone else’s problem being my problem, and it’s refreshing for that not to be the case anymore.
Mike: That sounds like a lot of fun. I’m just going to ask you a quick question about the podcast. Actually. You know, it seems like everybody’s got a podcast. We’ve got a podcast as you’re on it. What do you think’s the future of podcasts? Do you think this is a media that’s here to stay, or are people just going to get swamped with too many different podcasts?
Joel: It’s a really good question. There are loads of them. I just think it’s such an incredibly powerful medium in itself. When you think of just core audio, but obviously you have video as well. You have atomized content as well, and you have the ability to embed that content and use it to pull out streams together as a someone who comes from a journalistic editorial background. What I love about it is that there’s your ability to reuse it creatively, particularly in the world of AI, for example. One of the reasons, the reason I started my podcast, is I very publicly said, is I very publicly said I’m gonna write a book, and because that was my kind of posts, my new world projects, what I realized the reason I was gonna write a book is because I wanted to get speaking engagements and other projects of interest to do. And whereas I didn’t actually need the book to do that, the book would take a long time to do that. But the podcast was suggested to me as a means of kind of populating the book. So the podcast has stayed, and the book’s gone, and the podcast is giving me an ability to kind of explore some of the more pressing themes I was going to look at in that book, but in a more agile way, and also more transparent way, where you’re having those conversations with people and are making the whole thing available and then repurposing it. So I think it’s a really dynamic medium. And I think from a point of view, listen, I’m sorry this is a long answer, but if you can get into someone’s literally into their ears when they’re doing things that aren’t Mark job related, like walking the dog or gardening or washing up or cooking, then that’s incredibly powerful, much more so than sat at our desks trying to read something because we know we ought to.
Mike: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things is, you know, we used to have printed magazines, you know, arrive on our desk. We’ve now got podcasts. I mean, they’re two examples of, you know, what for the reader was free media. But actually, if you look at what’s happened with B2B marketing and Propolis, particularly, you’re building a lot around a, you know, paid for community. And also, you know, conferences which aren’t cheap. I mean, do you think marketers, or maybe their companies are investing more in their future and their development than maybe they were 20 years ago?
Joel: That’s a tough question. I think there is a there is an understanding that people need to invest in a structured way. And conferences. Do conference sit into that structured learning process? Not sure. It’s a tough one. I know you get value out of them, but it doesn’t fit into what an HR person might necessarily see as a structure development program. I think that Propolis is designed to provide a lot more of that structure and provide and be very strategically goal orientated around what you’re trying to achieve as a team and what the function where the function needs to improve, and then deploy the resources against that. So I think that that that we’re seeing much more of that there were people in the market who did that, people like Forrester who but they often it was very expensive what they provide, they didn’t still provide, and often they prevent. Presented you with a kind of an idealized version of what you could do, which no one could really relate to, because actually wasn’t very achievable, whereas what we’re trying to achieve with properties, and I’m sorry this sounds like a sales pitch, is something which is very customized, more orientated around you, what you particularly want, but also we need rather and also, then what we’re exploring now, which is really Exciting, is using AI to deploy insights generated from other members of the community in that in anonymized fashion to answer your questions immediately. So there’s some really exciting ways you can get such a level of value from it, which you just couldn’t get anywhere else.
Mike: It’s really interesting. I think mentioned value about five times already in this this discussion. I mean, maybe look at the conference program, because that’s that’s quite isolated. How do you create conferences that really are valuable to people and keep them coming back?
Joel: Well, it’s worth saying, I’m not no longer involved in the I used to be the producer for about 15 years. I produced all of the conferences, and I sweated on those things, and I, you know, took passion out of it. I don’t do that anymore. And I, like I’d say it’s been time off for good behavior after a long period of time. So how does a team do that? Well, I think it’s about trying to understand the themes at top level that are important, and then trying to surface the stories and the brands are doing interesting things, and work with partners to do that. And then you have to work quite hard, as all conference producers should do. Most of them do do, to make sure that people understand what good looks like, and then then they propose something that aligns with that, and then actually come from deliver it, because they can fall down at any one of those stages. You know, the one of the biggest challenges our events have is the model that we exist in marketing for better or for worse, where people don’t want to just sponsor and turn up and have a stand they want to present, and that means you have to work even harder with people to make sure that what they deliver is actually genuinely objective and useful, because sometimes they don’t know they’re selling, even in wheaton when they are so that’s a tough gig. And you know, I think no matter how hard we try, somebody at the end of it will say, Well, that was more of a sales pitch. Should have been, and there’s only so much you can do. We have to balance that with sessions that are genuinely objective and have nothing, no, no pitch at all. I think it’s about 60% Unsponsored to sponsored. Well, a lot of the sponsor sessions can be really good, yeah.
Mike: And I guess a lot of the sponsor sessions bring in real life case studies, which you know is super important.
Joel: Absolutely, absolutely sometimes, I mean, sometimes even you get, you’ll get an uncurated session actually been produced by agency, and agency did all the hard work and created the story, and just give them the slide deck to the to the CMO. And so in some ways, what you’re doing when you’re getting a it doesn’t have all the time, but sometimes you’re getting a sponsor session. It’s just the same thing, except they’re putting their name the top of it, and they’re going to get the data people in the room, that kind of thing. So so you know, it’s not it’s probably less delineated than you might think from the outside.
Mike: I could talk a lot about, you know, what’s happening at B to marketing a Propolis, but I’d like to talk about things more generally. I mean, you know more about some of the broader stuff you’re doing. I mean, the first question is, you know, we talked four years ago. How do you think B2B marketing has changed in the last four years? And what does that mean for the future?
Joel: Wow. Well, I mean, in the 22 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a period that even compares remotely. I mean, 2008 2009 was a bit, was a bit tricky. But, you know, there’s absolute roller coast the last four years. I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well. First of all, she had COVID, and, you know, all events canceled, they were online. Then we thought we were getting out of that. And you had Ukraine, and then they had a cost of living crisis, which, which put, you know, the kibosh on the economy. And then things are starting to stabilize. If AI arrives, you know, with chat GP launch, that was, that was the moment where it starts to hit home, and then everything seems to snowball from there again. We seem to feel like we’re getting a handle on what’s happening. And then you have tariffs coming, you know, and that and that, then that impacts on sentiment and huge amount of challenges. It’s kind of like, you know, you feel like you’re just getting over one blow and you get hit by another one. I’m not saying it’s all bad, because it’s been very exciting and very dynamic, and we’ve all had to be more agile, but it has been, has been a difficult period to live through. And I think what the thing where we get to now is we live in this age of more pronounced, and the only thing you can be certain about is uncertainty, I guess, is the situation where change is going to be ongoing, and AI is really driving that change. I don’t think, and I know that’s a cliche. I know we hear about AI every day, and everyone’s bored the sick of it, but you can’t understate the importance of it. And I think that we can’t really envisage we’re just, we’re so, we’re so. Early in the journey towards what AI is going to do and what it can do, we can’t really properly envisage what any kind of midterm future looks like right now. And it’s interesting that the economist just called it the trough of despondency starts here, and they we barely must started.
Mike: I’m not going to delve too much into AI, I think a lot of people are talking about it, and also it’s something that’s going to change very quickly. I mean, one of the things I’m interested about in B2B is, how do you deal with this massive changes that are going on and very rapid changes? And one of the big discussions, I think, particularly around the fact that it’s harder to get data in digital and privacy is going to make that harder and harder, is this balance between short term performance marketing versus longer term brand building. Where do you stand on that? In B2B? Where should companies be?
Joel: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting conversation, and it’s definitely signed maturity that we’re able to have that conversation. Whereas I think if you asked it five years ago, it would have been very hard to make a case right now brand building. But I think LinkedIn and the B2B Institute have made a lot of noise about this. And to one extent, it’s good, because people have to be because long term is the right web for marketing to behave ourselves as short term marketing is long term, or at least medium to long term. But at the same time, I don’t think anything’s changed that dramatically, because you can, you know, people are going to say, Oh, you need to invest in long term branding and forget everything else. That’s nonsense that doesn’t work. And, you know, our data from the beat marketing world proves that we spent a lot of time, and we use AI to analyze the entries that we get in, and you can see the campaigns where they use brand and demand together in a meaningful way, are the ones that are most effective. And I think that there are, you know, there are a lot of people have seized on some of the data that LinkedIn have produced. LinkedIn have produced, and I think they’re disingenuous and a bit naive, deliberately around around what it actually means. In that respect, nothing’s really changed. We knew that we needed to build our brands at the same time as we drove demand. We need to be to commercial and be linked up to the sales team. Anybody who’s saying that is crazy, marketers have to be more commercial, rather than less commercial, and the idea of resolving the responsibility from brand is just ridiculous. So yes, how to build a strong brand, but do it in a way that drives brand, and do it recognizes that there are multiple touch points in B2B journeys, and need to do all the way along.
Mike: I think that’s a really strong message there, and I’ve got to follow it up with one of the other controversial topics in B2B. You know, if people are building brand, does this mean that actually B2B is going to stop being so boring, I guess, and become more exciting and more creative?
Joel: Mike I’m pretty sure you’re asking a controversial it really winds me up when people talk about B2B being boring, because it’s really complex, right? And that’s why I love it. I suspect that’s why you love it as well. You know, it’s not simple. It’s not like selling fish fingers on Mars bars, right? It’s a very, very complex product, and tech particularly, has it got less boring, it’s certainly got more human. And that does align with boringness or lack of it. We’re talking to people as human beings, rather than as buyers, and that is definitely a good thing. And if you think again about the BT marketing awards, we we did an analysis this year using AI, I’m sorry to use that word, those two letters again, because that, because that’s the only way you could do it, right? You can’t look through hundreds of entries as a human being. You just can’t consume or see the patterns in that that information. And the, you know, the five trends we identified were all, or four of them were certainly around humanization, right? And then it’s the five we ended up got. We’ve got to go, we’ve got a download on this if you’re interested. One is anti corporate messaging. The second one is physical and digital integration, and that’s less about humanization, but there is a dimension to it there. The third one is consumer grade entertainment, and that’s the strongest one. The fourth was an employee centric messaging, and the fifth one was radical transparency. So there’s four of those five are really strongly about humanisation, and that’s what came through. And I think that’s the journey that we’re on, and that’s a really good thing for the industry.
Mike: And do you think there’s risks? I mean, obviously the example that is easy to quote is when British Airways painted their tail planes. And without wanting to trivialize what happened, the research said that British Airways find themselves being seen as boring. They then did this whole funky tail planes tried to be cool, and actually people went, No, no. If I’m on an airplane, I want it to be boring. An exciting flight is really a bad idea. I don’t want to be diving down. I mean, do you think there’s a risk? Because people are so concerned about the potential downsides of decisions in B2B, that actually they are conservative. They do want it to be boring. They don’t want to, you know, buy something and then it be an exciting and stressful discussion with their manager.
Joel: I mean, that’s a really good question, I but I think ultimately, it’s about attention and then engagement and getting noticed. Because we’re in this world where we’re bombarded with hundreds of messages for hundreds of channels, and we just tune out most. We don’t see them. So you need to work harder. It’s not just that your journey has been on evolution. It’s just a response to the situation. And so you need to be engaged, engage people. I need to recognize that there are, that the nature of media is that it’s coming at you in your consumer life and your your work life. Was there a work life thing? I’m at home. I’m not sure if you’re at home, but there’s still. Room and necessity for the technical bits and pieces, but it’s probably somewhere down the line. There’s another brilliant example, which was from one of the airline manufacturers, or engine manufacturers, rather, airlines. It’s interesting. This is a coincidental analysis that you’d mentioned airlines as I’m mentioning it, but it was, again, did very well at the awards, where they were actually the whole whole issue was around engine noise, and they turned the they used the engine noise to compare the noise of this engine versus this engine, and they were sent that in. They allowed engineers and specifiers access to that in multiple different formats, and they tuned into the geekery, but it didn’t entertaining but also technical way. And that’s brilliant when you can do both of those things. You could cater for the entertainment value, but also provide that detail.
Mike: I think that’s fascinating. And I think, you know, maybe the definition of entertainment is slightly different with different B2B audiences. If you’re targeting engineers, what’s entertaining for them may not be entertaining for other people, don’t you think?
Joel: I think that’s probably true, and people in professional services as well, right? I think there’s, there’s, there are aspects of marketing in those professions, where you don’t want to look too frivolous, but at the same time, you’ve got to look human. You’ve got to look human.
Mike: Yeah, you don’t want your lawyer turning up in a clown suit just to be remembered.
Joel: It’s an interesting idea, though, isn’t it?
Mike: Yeah, I guess we’re going to have to touch on AI. I mean, four years ago we talked about marketing tech stacks. I mean, how much is AI changing the decisions people are making around their tech stacks, and what should people in B2B be looking for in a tech stack to future proof against AI?
Joel: Well, you know what actually things one area AI actually hasn’t had as big an impact as you might think it had, or has in other areas. I think what’s happened between now, certainly four years ago, probably, is that we had, there was a, there was kind of a golden age of martech, right? And it was more, more more, buy more, buy more platforms. Plug it together, you know, build this huge, towering edifice. I mean, some it’s a bit of a, you know, kind of metaphor there. But the, you know, the kind of, the gloss has worn off a lot of that vision, despite what Scott Brinker is best efforts. You know, Scott Brinker, the guy who does the martech landscape every year. Every year it gets 30% bigger, and there’s 1000s of platforms and solutions. So I think we’re in a much more mature place now, and there’s much more scrutiny being applied to what you buy. That doesn’t absolve you from still having to have a fundamental martech infrastructure. Martech spine is the best way to describe it, and you defer that one to Adam sharp, so you doesn’t defeat from doing that. Most of those platforms will have aI built into them. But AI isn’t the reason to buy the platform. The reason to buy the platform was because it’s doing a specific job, like your CRM or your marketing automation or your demand gen platform. I think the interesting bit is probably less around that kind of the stack aspect of because a lot of AI technologies are quite kind of point tactical solutions. They may not even plug into your overall, your overall infrastructure, and they can and should be deployed in a kind of relatively Footloose way. It’d be nice to have them rolled out in a consistent way, but I’ve kind of helped feeling that often they’re quite orientated towards particular use cases and particular functions within the organization. And I certainly wouldn’t worry the person saying you shouldn’t be exploring AI kind of content or production tools, because they’re not part of the overall strategic plan, because I think we just all got to be so onus on all of us to experiment every way we can.
Mike: That’s interesting. So I mean, tech stacks are not quite as hot. I think one thing that I don’t think we even talked about it four years ago is B2B influencers, and to me, I’m hearing more and more about people looking for influencers in B2B. I mean, do you think this is a trend that’s gonna have legs?
Joel: Yes, undoubtedly. Influencer Marketing. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the last 15 years, everyone said, bitch, this year’s with the Air B2B influencers. But I think it really has broken through now, and I think there are two, two primary reasons for that. The first is that actually, and Ogilvy did a really good piece on this. They actually kind of said, well, I mean, they probably, I think we’ve already done this, but this is the piece that I saw that resonated with me. Influencers is it’s not just about professional influences, like the ones you would see on YouTube for skincare products, for example. It’s a very broad church of individuals who are involved in being influential in B2B, and that includes employees, includes analysts, includes thought leaders in organizations, includes partners, you know, there’s, there’s a whole and includes journalists, you know, like me, shock horror. So it’s not just, you know, the model, the kind of the reframe and frame reference point you might have in B to C is just not the same. In B2B, it’s less likely to be paid. It’s not impossible, but it’s less likely that financial transaction influence you provide is probably more around micro or influence, rather than broad, rich influence. So the different there’s a whole different framework to think about. So to forget what you know, what you think you know about influence marketing from B to C. It’s a different world here. So that’s one part of the equation. The other bit is that I’m usually starting to see development tools, and I’ve skipped sketch Wellington earlier on, but they’re, you know, they they’ve done, they’ve got their thought leader ads. It’s not really thought leadership, it’s influencer ads. But at the same time, they’re very powerful. They’re very effective. They’re a great way of ramping up your impact via their platform. You know, it’s a really effective tool. Yeah, there are other ones out there as well where you can go and recruit influencers or use it to kind of help understand your influencer kind of portfolio. So it’s kind of, it’s definitely hit critical mass now, in my opinion.
Mike: I think it’s interesting though, because you pointed out how different it was to be to see influencers, and I think a lot of brands are struggling with that, because, you know, in B to C, you send the influence of the product, hopefully the influencer loves it, and, you know, features it. If they don’t, you send some money, and magically, it all works. It doesn’t work like that in B2B at all. So how do you think B2B companies can start building relationships with influencers when you know, there’s not something obvious that the supplier can give the influencer.
Joel: Well, most of the time, well, they’re also, they’re all the other thing to point Mike is that you can’t in a lot of situations. There’s a bribery rules around this, right? If you’re a corporate executive, you can’t take money for preventing a product this, and just not able to do that. But you use the word relationship, and that’s exactly right. It’s about finding somebody who is aligned with what you’re doing and has a similar, similar perspective. And that’s as one of the many profiles of influence you could use, and often about shared social cache. You know, it’s about them having a message similar to yours, and you being able to give them a stage at conference, for example, that kind of thing. So there are lots of ways you can demonstrate reciprocal value. People do have egos, allowing providing them with a means to facilitate their visibility and value is a really, really good thing. Employees are great influences as well. So you can cultivate that channel as and allow them and facilitate them to be voices, because it plays back to that trend in the awards I mentioned earlier on, and using employees as the voice for the company. So there are many, many ways of doing it. There are also, you know, there are emerging ways of finding people who have reach and visibility, where you do have to pay them. That’s that is starting to be a thing, but it’s never going to be as as binary or as dominant a thing as it is in consumer in my opinion.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, Joel has been, you know, really interesting. And obviously I’m very aware of time there is something that I’d love to know. I mean, you see a lot of activity across different B2B companies. What do you see happening at the moment, whether it’s, you know, particular campaigns or particular organizations that really impresses you.
Joel: Well, that’s, there’s so many different aspects to that that you could, you could pick up on. I mean, you know, I love it when you see, I think this trend towards consuming great entertainment is fantastic. You know, when you’re really starting to get people, give people something which they would willingly consume in their spare time. I think that’s a really, really powerful thing. There’s other trends you could pick up as well. We’re using, you know, using visualization, but I think one of the biggest challenges that we’re seeing that there’s a kind of macro issue across B2B is the issue of trust, and that’s the kind of focus of my podcast. And I think we’re in this situation where people are there’s a trust issue going on across society. I think that where campaigns are seeking to address that and build that trust is vital. And there’s three, three pillars to that for me, which is the first one is thought leadership, which is the ability to play out to actually, it’s the only function really that can only marketing tool at your disposal where you can actually has a has a compliant contribution at the top and the middle and the bottom of the funnel, because it can and should be used at all those levels. That’s the first one. The second one is influencer marketing. We’ve talked about that. And the third, which I think is fascinating, but really, really underutilized, but again, we’re starting to see something happening in this area, is advocacy, and we know that advocacy is tremendously powerful, which is that most companies, most brands, doing in a kind of piecemeal, half half hearted, half assed, last minute bolt on, kind of a way. Again, we’re starting to see really strategic, considered, structured advocacy efforts going on, and a part of that is driven by the development of tools to do this. It’s not the only reason it’s happening, but, but when you have tools, it formalizes the whole thing. So I’m sure it doesn’t quite answer your question, but those are the things I think are most interesting right now.
Mike: I think that was a great answer. It really talked about those, those key things that are high level. So I love that. Before I let you go, there’s always two questions we like to ask people so quick fire round. What’s the best marketing advice that’s ever been given to you?
Joel: I’m not a marketer, so I have to answer this in a bleak way. But I think that this is applies as someone who is seeking to be visible in the market and also to be effective within an organization. And I think that I just say, be yourself everyone else has taken. Because it’s very easy to look at people and to look at other people you think are successful and try and emulate their their themes, but their trends, other ways of behaving. But it’s not it has to be true to you. You’ll be most successful if you’re true to who you actually are, and you develop that, and you you’re you’re comfortable in your own skin, and you recognize what you’re good at and what you’re bad at.
Mike: love that. It’s great advice. And you’ve also talked about, you know, how rapidly things are changing. Changing. So what would you say to someone who was just starting their career and wanted to start a career in marketing?
Joel: Well, I think I say that it’s a rapidly changing industry. It’s exciting, it’s dynamic, and it’s creative, but you do have to be financially and commercially savvy to be successful as a marketer today, and if you’re not, if you haven’t got those attributes potentially within your skill set or your attributes, then it’s probably not the right career for you. It doesn’t mean you can’t be creative. Doesn’t mean you can’t do really exciting things with technology and digital services, but you’ve got to have a commercial head on your shoulders.
Mike: That’s great advice. I love that. I mean, I’m sure a lot of people listening to this podcast probably already follow you and are well connected, but if people are not, what’s the best way to, you know, follow what you’re doing and keep up to date.
Joel: Well, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d love you to do that, but you can also love you to subscribe to my podcast, which is trusted inference and B2B. You can get that anywhere you get your normal podcasts, or you can just follow my YouTube channel, where you get all of the podcast stuff as well. And you also get, I do, I go to a regular beach marketing events, and I do videos, I interview people, so you get all of that stuff as well. And if you really want it’s really feeling particularly exciting, you can put on Instagram as well. So I’m trying to use all of these channels as best I can. You know, I am an old dog, and yes, I am trying to learn new tricks.
Mike: That’s awesome. I really enjoyed this. I feel like, you know, we’ve left probably enough discussions for at least another two podcasts, so hopefully at some point we’ll have you back. Joel,
Joel: I’d love to thanks so much for inviting me on.
Mike: Thanks for being a guest on marketing B2B technology.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierB2Be calm or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
