So in order to humanize our content and really put the people forward, we do heavily rely on individuals to leverage their personal profiles to continue to push that message. So just how I'm on this podcast talking about the marketing angle, we have other leaders at the company who are talking about their specific slides of the work that we do. That's good. And welcome to a new episode of digital Coffee Marketing brew. And I'm your host, Brett Dyster.
And this week we're going to be talking obviously about marketing because this is what it's all about, but also b two b marketing. A little bit about content in that in general, because it's one of those things that is important for b two b as well. But I have Alex with me, and she has over 15 years of experience of marketing and startup experience, both in private and public sectors. She's.
Prior to joining Riva Solutions, Alex has served as the head of marketing at the clearing and an entrepreneur at heart. She's also co founded the digital district in 2013, which is a 501 c six organization aimed at fostering innovation education in the digital sphere. But welcome to the show, Alex. Thanks so much for having me. Yes, and the first question is all. My guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Coffee. Iced coffee all year. Iced coffee.
So not like cold brew, but just like iced coffee. Oh, it's cold brew. Okay. To be fair, there's a whole container of cold brew in my fridge. Yes, it's all cold brew. Gotcha. You have any like favorite types of cold brew or favorite companies that you prefer more than others? I usually just go, Costco carries the very large dunkin, so that's what's in there. And then I have a variety of different syrups and make the foam for it. So depends on the day, the flavor. But yeah, Dunkin isn't my coffee.
No worries. I gave a brief explanation of your expertise. Can you give my listeners a little bit more about what you do? Yeah, sure. So I'm currently the vice president of marketing communications at Riva Solutions. Riva is an it government contractor, so we service the federal government, help them modernize all their legacy it systems. So I have a really fun job. I do both the external marketing and all the internal communications and employee engagement for the company.
So government contractor, not typically, you would think a fun, creative space, but we actually are a pretty fun company. We have an alpaca as our mascot and we do a lot of really cool marketing things that you would typically see for a government contractor. So definitely one of the reasons why I'm still at Riva and in the government contracting space because I have a lot more leeway than I typically would at a regular government contractor. So how is being a government contractor in marketing?
How does that all work? Because I'm pretty sure there's a lot of things that you cannot say. So how do you figure out what you to market it without stepping over that line of what you can say? Yeah, it's definitely a delicate balance. And a lot of our marketing is not necessarily directly to the government. If you're unfamiliar with how government contracting deals work, you're typically working with a variety of different companies on the same contract.
So we actually do a fair amount of b two B marketing, advertising to other companies who have employees or skill sets or relationships that we don't have so that we can partner and create a joint team to do the work. So we do a ton of ton of b two B marketing where we have a little bit more leeway in terms of what we can say. And then again, we're always hiring and recruiting. So we do a lot of recruiting marketing to get the best talent into the company.
But in terms of the actual marketing we do for the government, you're right, we can't always mention our customers or our clients. You'll see a lot of a large federal agency in some of our work unless we actually go through the approval process with the ethics and communications departments, which we do, but is a little bit longer and a little bit more calculated in terms of what we cannot say. Got you. So what you found more effective when doing marketing strategies for b two B specifically?
Maybe in content or just in general for b two B? What have you found, which marketing strategies have you found effective this year? Yeah, we do a lot of digital marketing and we are a company of employees who are out there in the marketplace a lot. So there's a ton of industry events that we go to, a lot of conferences, a lot of happy hours, other things like that.
So we too, we do a ton of employee generated content because my team is, it's fairly small, there's four of us, so we can't be everywhere all the time covering all the topics. So we do have a cadre of our business development and sales folks who are generating a lot of our content for us.
So we're relying on them to supplement our calendar tag people, make the relationships, and then give us the insights from the events that they're at so that we can turn that into thought leadership, different sort of pieces, turn it into videos, so tons of digital marketing and then a lot of relationship building in real life as well.
And so with that do for like b two B, would you use more like LinkedIn or something like that to get out to create content or maybe get better business relationships? Would it be X, Twitter? Which social platforms would you utilize for b two B? Yeah, we're typically doing most of our connections community building on LinkedIn. We do have an Instagram account. It is more focused on our culture content, so it is a little bit more on the recruitment side. It's life at Reva, if you will.
We do definitely share our technical content on Instagram as well, and our contract wins, but definitely not where we're necessarily seeing interactions with some of our customers. More on the employee relationship side, we've partnered ways with Twitter, X with all of that. Not a platform that we really manage anymore. And Facebook as well, had a Facebook when it was cool and have keep it for posterity's sake, but not something that we invest a ton of time in right now.
So what have you found to be good for relationship building within LinkedIn? Because personally, for me, I get a lot of podcast promoters and they do a lot of hard selling and I just ignore them because I'm just like, that's not what I'm looking for. Stop bugging me. So how do you effectively do that? Because I feel like a lot of people want to be good at it, but don't, haven't figured out the right tempo to, I guess, build that, build relationship building, as you said.
Yeah, my inbox looks like that, too. I get a lot of cold calls on different software and other things that people are trying to sell me. And it's always very apparent that they have never done their research in terms of what we do or I'm not really doing any lead gen right in the government contracting space. So I'm sure your software is great, but it's not something I can purchase. So yeah, my inbox looks like that, too.
I think we, we rely really more on the, like, comments, engagement tagging, people, getting people to reshare. We do a ton of outreach to our employee base. Anytime we have a new piece of content out that is a little bit more prolific and we need some reshares. We've done a ton of training, which is atypical, I think, to the entire employee base, not just our business development and external facing folks, because every employee has a network that you. That may be beneficial, right?
You don't, you never know who someone's connected to and who they know. So we've done a lot of training, we've done a little bit of gainification for that. Right. We had a leaderboard at one point, right? What employees are doing cool stuff and resharing for us, which they could then cash in for swagbucks, bonuses, other things like that. But yeah, it takes time. I think that's the thing that most people aren't willing to dedicate to.
And it is one person's almost full time job on my team because it is so important to us to be able to make those connections, make sure that content's getting in front of the right people, but constantly tagging, commenting, engaging, prompting discussion. It's a lot of work for sure, but you get in what you get out. And if you're willing to put in the time and be a little bit patient, you'll definitely start to see your community and your relationships grow.
And should you build that community within, like maybe your business profile page, or should you use like, personal pages? How should you actually do that? Because there is a business profile page that LinkedIn has a lot of people forget about it because everybody's so focused on the, their own personal page that they forget, oh, yeah, we have business profiles too. So do you do both?
Do you, like, mix it up and do your own personal stuff and share it there, but also have it on the business side as well? Yeah, we definitely do a mix of both. Our company page is very active, so that is where most of the formal posts will come through. But as you noted, right, social media more is about personal connections and we self services. So that is also on the personal, human side of business.
So in order to humanize our content and really put the people forward, we do heavily rely on individuals to leverage their personal profiles to continue to push that message. Just how I'm on this podcast talking about the marketing angle. We have other leaders at the company who are talking about their specific slides of the work that we do, being very generous about our lessons learned, what works, what doesn't work. Right.
That's a part of our culture, to give away a little bit of our secret sauce and how we look at things. But yeah, your content only goes as far as the reshares and again, the other ancillary networks that you have. So that's why we've invested so much in training every single person in the company to interact with our content. Because the more reshares, the more comments, the more tags that we have, the larger our company page and our network goes.
You end up figuring out the algorithm a little bit more and ending up in front of and on the feed of the people that you truly want to you that content, whether or not it's your company page and they start to follow your company page, or it's a prompt to connect with a second or third degree connection that you now have in your network. And what have you found to be like, good content for LinkedIn? Is it still the picture carousel with all the pictures that go for?
That's been the rage for about a year. Has been some videos, has it been some, quote pictures? What have you found to be the more engaging part about it? Yeah, we get the highest engagement rate still on pictures of people doing things somewhere. So as much as we do try to put out our thought leadership and we do use the carousels, we have started to get a little bit more into more formal video.
Outside of the real informal content, really, pictures of our team out there is what people interact with the most. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. You start to get those comments, you get to tag more people, and then people get interested in what you're doing and come out to the next event. So I think last month, any of our, we call it culture content. So when we have our team out there, culture content, our engagement rate is 26% and our solutions content is like five or six. Right.
So people, again, really want to interact with the humans, see what we're doing, and are definitely a little bit less interested in interacting with some of our more technical content. And, I mean, for tagging people, what's the right way of doing it? Because I'm pretty sure everybody tries to tag people in it, but there's some right ways of doing it. And there's some ways where you're like, you probably shouldn't just tag them 50 times because they're in, like.
Yeah, like, a lot of pictures, if. A person has absolutely no presence in the post or relevant to it, don't tag them. So we typically try to tag the individuals who are in the pictures. Or if it's a project team that we happen to be talking about, we will think the project team or the department that was influential in either planning the event or doing something with the content. The one caveat to that is I'll tag our CEO. In most things, it's his company. He deserves the tag for that.
But, yeah, if you're just going out there, like, tagging random people because they're an influencer in your space, or there's someone that you want the content that's probably the fastest way to piss people off.
I always get those on Instagram, untag those random things like I don't care about your giveaway or whatever, but if they are a part of the content and you think that they deserve visibility or you want them to interact because they were part of it, then you can certainly tag them in it. And have you found like the LinkedIn news articles or the newsletters to be beneficial for you guys in the b two b space? Are they more b two c, or have you not really tried to go into that space yet?
We haven't really messed with the newsletters too much. Email marketing is not really something that we leverage that much in general, let alone the newsletters. We do a fair amount of LinkedIn articles, but again, that is baked into different leaders within the company, their sort of personal branding marketing strategy. So our CEO will put out a monthly post about something that is a hot topic to him.
I offer a lot of LinkedIn articles as well, so that seems to be a better use of some of their alternative features besides just posting. But part of the reason we don't venture into some of the newsletters and other features like that is because we're a small team and we don't always have reliable content, like new content coming in. So if you're going to invest in something like a newsletter, you do need to have a pretty beefy pipeline of content or things that you can slice up and reshare.
And because we're a small team and small budgets, we don't always have that. So until we are in a place where we feel very comfortable that we have very regular, repeatable insights coming out from that people are going to be interested in, we probably wouldn't delve into that universe or people are going to get really bored of our newsletter very quickly.
Also, I think it also depends on industry, given that if you work in the government, there's vast amount of things you can't really talk about, which could be good content, but you still can't talk about it. Yeah, and every government agency is in a different place. Yes, they are all slightly behind in terms of modernization of systems, but they all have different missions and how we would position our work or help them solve their problem is going to be different agency to agency.
So just putting out a blanket statement on here's how you modernize your cloud systems probably isn't going to appeal to everybody. And as I said before, a lot of our marketing isn't necessarily directly to the government. We do most of that marketing through direct white papers, relationship building, very specific, tailored content that we can hand directly over in more of an advisory role.
A lot of more of the content that we put out for general consumption is either geared towards other companies that we want to partner with or potential talent for the company. And what are some of the biggest hurdles, you think, for the B two B space and marketing in terms of content or just like digital marketing wise? What are things that B two B businesses should focus on this year, and what things should they stop focusing on for this year?
Yeah, so AI is really popular and I use it daily, but I think people, especially those who have smaller teams or small budgets, maybe think things like chat, GPT and these tools are a replacement for an actual marketing strategy or marketing teams, when really the content that comes out of something like that is average at best. And it's pretty quick.
For those of us who work in marketing or use these tools for idea generation, I know that this was not written by a human fairly quickly based on a couple of word choices that were stuck in there. So I think it's a slippery slope. I think we're going to see a ton more AI generated content that's going to flood everybody's feeds.
And for those of us who are actually spending the time to write thoughtful, strategic content, that's going to start to push people out of the algorithm and less people are going to start to see the valuable content that's being created. So I think as a marketer learning how to leverage those appropriately, they have a place. Like I said, I use JepGBt daily. It definitely helps me. It cuts part of my brainstorming and outlining process and even sometimes first drafts time drastically.
But I never trust what comes out of the prompt. It is too generic, it's not in our right tone. It doesn't have the specific details of what we're trying to do. It is really, for me, just an idea generator, and it's much, much faster for me to edit that draft or fill in the gaps from that outline than it is for me to stare at a blank piece of paper.
So I think that's probably one of the big issues for this year, is how do we as marketers figure out the appropriate way to leverage these AI tools to be more impactful, but not rely on them as the only source of content creation? And do you think it's up to the social media platforms to try to figure that part out too? Because I know YouTube does have a section where I upload videos. Hey, does this video have a person that's not really saying is AI generated? Like, I have to check the box now.
Is that something also that social media companies, including LinkedIn, should probably figure out to figure out, like maybe like a tag or something that says AI generated so people understand what they're reading. So they go, okay, this may or may not be good or it may be fake. Yeah, I think it's a little bit of a lag, right? It's like when influencers went wild for a while with all the sponsored content that wasn't labeled sponsored.
And so you, as the consumer thought, oh, hey, maybe this actually is a really good product that this person loves and they're just promoting because they really like this product and come to find out they're on the payroll for that. And this content's not authentic. It is sponsored content. So I think we'll probably start to see that trend more often. As AI content gets again, more mainstream, people are starting to use it.
That will be a flag that will be more prevalent so users understand where it came from. And I think it will be interesting for LinkedIn too, because you're starting to see that you have that option built into LinkedIn. There now is rewrite with AI or what have you built directly into their features? I haven't ever used that button, so actually don't know.
But I assume in the future if you hit that button, it would be very easy for LinkedIn to put that flag on there, that this is an original content, that this person used the easy button, if you will, for the content. I used it once. No preference. It, the rewrite AI thing is on the premium service only. You can't get it without, okay, without buying the premium service. So that does get most of the people from doing it. So it's not a flood of AI things. I used it once.
It wasn't bad if you're trying to type something out and it's, I don't know where I'm going with this. And you have AI do it for you. It does help give you a little bit more direction, but I agree. Trust, but verify is probably the best way of saying it. Like you could trust to a certain extent, but still read it over again. Yeah, it's so obvious when someone did not read it at all.
And we've caught a couple of our competitors who clearly just copy and pasted something and we have a good laugh about it. And some of our solutions team is, I'm very thankful we still have a human based marketing team who can help us craft these messages. And isn't again, relying on a computer to spit it out. Anybody can do that. And would you tell, like other marketers, do you prefer jacket? Because there are several of them.
There is gronk, which is part of Twitter size x if you have the premium service. There is chat GPT. There's Gemini, which used to be barred now because Google likes to change all their things all the time. And there's copilot on Windows Eleven, which I think uses chat GPT as well. There's perplexity. Claude, would you tell marketers to pick and choose which one is right for them because there's a ton of them.
Some of them are good, some things, some are bad at some things, like that type of a thing. Yeah, I think experiment, that's the key. There's a new platform every 30 seconds, I'm sure, and it's very difficult to keep up because every time I see one of those icon maps of all of the different marketing tools there are now that I haven't heard of, probably 99% of them, I'd say daily. Again, I'm a premium user of chat GPT.
That's the one that I just find that has met most of my needs in terms of how I'm using it. I've dabbled in mid journey. It's fun. It doesn't really help me in the graphic design needs that I need professionally, but it is fun to throw some of those prompts in there every once in a while. Just see the wonky graphics that come out of there. We've started to use the canva AI features. They have a long way to go. Canva is a great marketing tool.
Maybe their AI is not quite there yet, but I think there's no harm in trying these tools because again, you might land on something that, like you said, does fill a gap that you have on your team, or cuts down on your manual process, or creates templates for you so you can be more efficient with your time. So try them. All right? Or try as many as you have the capacity to.
But I'd say go in with a purpose in mind that you're trying to fill a certain gap, or look for a software that does XYZ, because you either. It's an arduous process, you don't enjoy it, you don't have the resources on your team, go in with a purpose in mind and that will help you narrow the field in terms of what products you should take a look at and maybe experiment with. And what trends do you see for b two b marketing in 2024 good question. We are leveraging more informal video content.
I don't know if that's a new trend or something that we're again, the government's usually a little bit behind, but not everything has to be as polished, right? We went through a phase where everything's very production oriented, and then with the pandemic people being more dispersed, we're seeing a lot less polished content. As a team that is dispersed across the US, we don't always have the luxury of bringing people into a studio space.
So we are relying a little bit more on recording virtual interviews, virtual content, things like that, and things that we can produce much faster because again, small budget, small team, we have a lot of content to get out into the universe. The faster I can get something out there, the faster we can start moving on to something else. So I think you'll see a little bit more informal content and again, that kind of plays up to the human aspect of it.
Again, not everyone has a recording studio or video studio to produce in something a little bit more authentic when it's someone just recording themselves or putting together something a little bit quicker with less of a script and less production quality. Nice. And so where can people find you online? Yeah, absolutely. The best place to find me is LinkedIn. That's where I hang out most of the time, but also Instagram. But at this point, my Instagram is just my baby and powerlifting video.
So if you're not interested in dogs, babies or powerlifting, Instagram is not the place to hit me up. But definitely LinkedIn for anything professional. I am always interested in dogs. As you can see, two dogs run around behind me all the time, so no problem with that for me. But any final thoughts for listeners? No, I really enjoyed the conversation. And again, I think check out chat TPD if you haven't yet, and other if you've got other platforms that you really enjoy using, send them my way.
I'm always happy to experiment. All right, thank you, Alex, for joining digital coffee marketing brew and sharing your knowledge on b two B marketing and a little bit of government marketing as well. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. And thank you for listening to digital coffee marketing brew. As always, please subscribe to your favorite or this podcast on your favorite apps. The five star review really does help with the rankings and this is how I'm doing.
And join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the pr industry. All right, guys, stay safe. Get to understanding your BDB marketing and your content, and maybe LinkedIn a little bit more and see you next week. Later.