Goldenhour 2024: GenAI whiplash and “Don’t settle for shitty writing”

Introduction

This past week, the folks at AudiencePlus hosted their very first event dedicated to B2B marketing with a deep focus on content marketing and brand.

And I just want to kick this piece off with the most important, clear thing anyone said:

“Don’t settle for shitty writing.”

Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew and now StoryArb, knows what he’s talking about. He’s built one of the most iconic content brands in the world with MorningBrew. And his comments represented a lot of what the rest of the room was feeling.

In corners of the event, which you’d never know by the quality of content and production was the first for AudiencePlus, and on stage, actual humans were talking about the impact of powerful, human-designed and built content.

Let’s dig in.

Video is hotter than ever.

What marketing content do you really remember from the last week? Month? Year?

At the dawn of YouTube, there was a long form ad series from Reebok about Terrible Terry Tate, Office Linebacker. 3 minutes and 40 seconds. I watched it, at my desk at work, probably 5 times the first day it came out. I will never forget it. It’s hysterical.

Vimeo had an interesting demo of their interactive video feature at Goldenhour. But what felt most compelling about video at Goldenhour was how humans were getting together to conceptualize and produce really engaging stuff.

AudiencePlus had a live studio during the event (again, seriously, the event quality was far above most stuff that’s been running for 10+ years).

Tim Davidson had a booth at the event where he was live-creating videos of him chatting with B2B marketers and, in his classic TikTok-style, chopping fruit at the same time.

Videos are dynamic and engaging. In B2B, video can quickly convey complex information and value propositions which is a huge win for marketers and sellers alike. Google likes video results in search (which helps to address something later in this article).

Why?

One, a ton of decision makers at this point grew up with video. Millennials were there on day one with YouTube and IG. And now GenZ is making plenty of SaaS decisions.

And perhaps beyond the ubiquity of video amongst decision makers is the plain fact that video is arguably the best channel to communicate your brand.

BRAND. Brand, brand, brand. I can’t say this enough. B2B sells to humans. Sure, there needs to be a business value proposition. But the person pushing you through procurement or swiping their credit card needs to feel something about you.

That’s brand, y’all.

Quality (brand) is hotter than hot.

This point deserves its own discussion.

First, I think it’s really important that B2B marketers, collectively, recognize where we started.

It used to be that we only ran the trade show booths (lotta love for field marketing - shout out to Kayla Drake for a killer Apollo.io event after Goldenhour). Got swag produced and shipped. No one had a C-level title. Rarely even a VP title and, even when we did, we were in the back of the room (if we were in the room at all).

I credit Eloqua and Marketo with elevating marketing and marketers. We were enabled to do incredible things. We started creating leads via the internet. Email moved out of Outlook and into being a strategic practice.

Then HubSpot helped us all figure out Inbound Marketing. It was all about content. We went from a volume push to a quality pull operation. That meant we needed points of view, C-suite participation, and to adopt a voice.

But I wouldn’t call it brand work.

[don’t get pissed at that]

It wasn’t. Do you know how I know?

For each of the following taglines, I’m not going to tell you what brand it’s associated with. Because I don’t have to:

• The happiest place on earth
• Just do it
• A diamond is forever
• You’re in good hands

(first 10 people to email the four brands gets a coffee gift card on me: nzeckets@airtrafficcontrol.io)

Is there a B2B brand that hits you like any of those? Think about the five biggest pieces of software you use for work.

Can you remember their taglines?

If they were a person, what would they be like at a party?

Now, this isn’t to say that brand is just copywriting. It’s not.

Several people at Goldenhour quoted Jeff Bezos’ definition of brand:

“Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.”

What everyone seems to have absolute clarity on in B2B marketing right now is that we should and can move towards how we make our markets feel about themselves and us with a deep purpose. There are tactical ways to do that and more foundational ways to do that.

Tactics include things like G2 reviews, customer stories, co-creation of content with customers, and doing actual customer research (NPS is bullshit - change my mind). And, yes, video and other deep, high quality content is 100% a requirement.

Foundationally, it’s all about WHO your brand is. Who are YOU as a brand at a party? This should drive everything from product design to hiring. It should be in the DNA of every decision you make.

Owned Audiences > Rented Audiences

The event, because of AudiencePlus, had an owned audience flavor to a lot of it.

First, let’s chat headwinds.

SEO is (maybe) dying

Don’t freak out. Just sit with this for a minute.

SEO is about a search algorithm. Not readers. And, you know, GenAI in search looks like it’s going to eat a lot of our clicks.

Does ATC have a SEO strategy? Yes. We do.

But we also have 16K contacts in our HubSpot account.

What do we have with those folks that we don’t have with the people outside of our database?

• Brand awareness
• Insights into what they care about
• A direct path to share value

During one of the panels, Amanda Goetz shared that “you have to be mining [your owned audience] for gold.”

Mining a rented audience largely looks like keyword research. Which isn’t about a person. It’s about an algorithm.

Something we do here at ATC that is transformative to understanding and connecting with your owned audience is looking at what they’ve engaged with through your emails, web visits, and other touch points, digging into their social profiles, and tracking news about their employers to figure out what they care about. We go deeper to see what our customers have written about and where there are opportunities to write rich content around the topics their customers care about:

Then we hop right to automating your desk research:

GenAI Whiplash

My sense was that there’s a bit of GenAI whiplash washing over marketers. We’re largely in a trough of disillusionment. That doesn’t mean GenAI won’t be important and valuable in the future and even now, but the math has transformed.

Folks seem to have gone from “GenAI is a 10X tool for marketers” to “GenAI is a 20% optimization tool for marketers.”

20% is HUGE. HUGE.

But it is in no way a replacement.

Do More With Less (still)

While panelists and attendees said that their teams were largely off the chopping block, headcount’s only bouncing back in a handful of organizations.

Jack Foster, CMO at Workramp, said during another panel that she’s being asked to achieve more with the resources she has. So, not less resources. But more, all the same. And that’s generally what I heard from a lot of other folks.

I think that’s a bit of where marketers were hoping GenAI was going to help them. And it is to some degree. Again, a 20% bump in output is big.

But the thing I keep coming back to is “the resources I already have” needing to produce more.

In ATC’s context, I’ll take Jack and Workramp as an example because I think they look a lot like a lot of other B2B marketing orgs.

They’re on HubSpot.

They have 483 blog posts.

184 resources (whitepapers and the like).

And if they’re like everyone else in B2B, those 667 assets are mostly hanging out on the website while the team races to create -> distribute -> start again.

There’s an incredible opportunity to completely rethink how we do more with what we have.

The first thing is to believe in the power of your entire body of work.

Something we do here at ATC is create interest graphs for every contact in a marketing automation platform like HubSpot and then recommend content based on those interest graphs:

Then we stick those recommendations back into the marketing automation platform, CRM, etc:

So you can build landing pages, chat bot responses, and email templates with the best content you have for every contact:

And deliver 1:1 experiences, at scale, with the resources you already have:

Doing more with what you have is immensely critical.

It’s how B2B marketers are going to achieve and blow past their goals.

And it just isn’t an option for growth. It’s a mandate.

See you next year

We’ll be back at Goldenhour next year. No doubt. Kudos to that team on what they put together.

And I cannot thank the speakers and attendees enough for being so smart and offering up so much great insight into how B2B marketing can win in 2024.

I’m optimistic that we’ll get to play a role in that success for a lot of teams this year so that when we all pull back together there’s a shared sense of relief (elation, maybe, even?) that we blew past our goals while keeping burn down.