The Secret to Non-Boring B2B Content, with Adam McQueen, Director of Product Marketing & Content at Klue

0:00Tamara Grominsky:Most B2B brands are boring on purpose and the ones that aren't have quietly built an entire media company inside their marketing team. Welcome back to another Flashback Friday where we pull an episode out of the archive that's still worth your time. This week's episode is a fun one. My good friend Tamara is in the host seat flipping the script on Adam McQueen who's usually the one producing from behind the scenes. Adam leaves Clue where he built their in-house content arm, The Complete Network. Years before B2B creator category even existed. Tamara and Adam get into how Clube built a media strategy around people instead of the brand.

0:38Tamara Grominsky:What less is more actually looks like in a marketing org that wants to do everything. And Adam's simple trick for proving ROI on content that doesn't have a clean dollar figure attached. If you're thinking about entertainment as part of your content mix, or you just want to hear Tamara turn the tables on a producer, sir. This one's a good one to re-listen to. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen.

1:22Tamara Grominsky:Get ready to turn the f*** up.

1:27Adam McQueen:Adam, welcome to the show.

1:29Tamara Grominsky:This feels weird. I shouldn't be on this side of the microphone right now. What's going on?

1:35Adam McQueen:It's so fun. Yeah. So for context for all of our listeners out here, Adam and I have worked together on another podcast where I was the host and Adam was my producer. And so I get to flip the script on him this time and do a little interview, kind of get into your head.

1:51Tamara Grominsky:I know. I feel very awkward. I feel like on the other side, I have all the power. I get to ask all the questions for you when you're a guest on the show and then your own show when we're the producer. We get to just kind of dictate the terms and you have to say all the smart things. Like there's nothing on there's no sweat off my back. But now you've put me on the spot. So I'm excited. I'm excited. Now I'm in the driver's seat. Yeah, I'm going to drive us.

2:14Adam McQueen:So I think, I mean, it's a great context because that's why I wanted to have you on the show today. So you work at Clue. I think Clue is one of the best companies building the best kind of like B2B entertainment out there. And I don't just say that because my show is one of those shows.

2:30Tamara Grominsky:Maybe a little bit.

2:32Adam McQueen:Maybe a little, but I think we would both agree that most B2B brands are super boring. They're not entertaining to watch. Maybe they come out with like a product trailer that's entertaining, but they're certainly not thinking about media from an overall entertainment perspective. And, you know, for years now, I think you guys have gone the complete opposite direction. You've actually built an entire in-house media arm called the Compete Network. Take us back to the origin. What was the spark for that?

3:06Tamara Grominsky:The origin. Oh, my gosh. This is so many years ago now, and I have terrible memory, but I'll do my best. So I remember as I joined Clue, we're in sort of this competitive intelligence category. Product marketing kind of is one of our like core ICP. And I guess one of the biggest things that I start to learn quickly on the job and content, and this isn't like anything new, but like sort of the best content out there, like even back then, what does it mean four or five years ago? Like kind of the gong playbook was just like teach the audience something they didn't know. within their realm, you're going to earn sort of this kind of like mind show, you're going to earn currency and people are going to gravitate to that brand.

3:46Tamara Grominsky:And that was just like kind of like the simple thing that like underpinning for a lot of like our early like content or marketing. And then with that, at the same time was just this like observation of like what was happening increasingly, at least in like the B2B space that like sort of like influencers, people with their own voices, individual like thought leaders on LinkedIn and things like that were really starting to explode on LinkedIn at that point. And that was sort of the way of like sort of how people were consuming things. And so from sort of Kate, this was mainly like Katie, my boss's perspective was like, we need to start with just like, we need to consolidate everything.

4:26Tamara Grominsky:Like there's some thought leaders here doing some good stuff. I see someone's running a course here. There's someone that's like doing a newsletter. like how do we help consolidate this in one place for like product marketers or people in competitive intel trying to understand like what they should do and so it really at first was like can we get this into one place and then how do we overlay that with some of the stuff that we're producing ourselves that was like the opening thought and then it developed into like what i'm most probably passionate about with this part is like how do you start to work with people that have an audience knowing that people it's like a very like people first economy at this point how as vendors do you work best with those folks and my belief was um was being able to build the plumbing and produce the stuff on the back end and be experts in all of that so talent like yourself that show up just have to do what they're best at which is like their subject matter expertise personality all of those things creating the content and that we would handle all the rest and that's a unique value we could provide that helped us do things really efficiently with a lot of different folks in the product marketing space.

5:35Adam McQueen:I mean, you mentioned, this goes back at like four years origin story. I feel like you guys actually were early to the creator space because I would say in the last 18 months on LinkedIn, B2B creators are a thing, but I don't think four years ago, I mean, I was posting content, but I don't even think I would have considered myself a creator at that point. So I do feel like you were early to the trend.

5:55Tamara Grominsky:but yeah it was like you could start to see stuff though right like you started to see more people having a bit of a follow maybe they weren't like quite to the like level of maturity is now with like partnerships and sponsorships and all of those things or running more like media properties like people running their own shows and stuff there was more so maybe growing a following on linkedin um but you could still see it you could still see oh these are the people like getting their dm shared around it's like you could and it made sense and then you just take that i always like to do is in this like moment especially like for any marketing it's like i know i am only a sample size of one but like how do i consume stuff today am i following brands or am i following a person it's like oh i follow this person's office like i don't want to make too much of just myself but like i think it's important when you're doing marketing as well to just like take a step out like what are my own consumption habits and we just increasingly saw that and i saw that as a cool way to work with more like just subject matter experts and people that are good at creating content as well in our space.

6:57Adam McQueen:Totally. No, I think you're right. That's how I also consume content and have been for years. Like I even think I've cannot say that I've ever once gone to HubSpot and like looked at their blog, read any content, no offense to HubSpot, but I do listen to my first million, literally every episode that gets dropped. And I read the hustle for years, right? And those are two properties that HubSpot now owns. And so there is something to be said to like showing up where your audience is showing up before they kind of even come searching for you.

7:29Tamara Grominsky:A million percent. I think that that was that was like kind of the driving force for like our early content strategy, them working with people and this. And then it became that kind of probably dovetails nice into like, OK, what were the it's I think the word like media arm media could mean literally anything if you really want to. But I was like, what are the actual media properties we want to create. Actually, I've got a lot of like things I probably do differently now, but I think that's like really important when you think about what's the media property we want to create and making sure that you pretty much another one thing you should decide is like making sure that that whatever you create is going to show up where your audience is.

8:08Adam McQueen:Okay, let's break that down then. Explain for our listeners kind of what are the media properties that you guys have today? And also maybe as you're going through that, give us maybe a little bit of those tidbits of like what you would have done differently and why

8:23Tamara Grominsky:okay so immediate property can be again i kind of understood it could be anything but like the things that we would do we start with like even back when i was a content team one it was our tim pot little podcast which at the back of the day we're like oh this is novel no one's doing a podcast now everyone and their dad has a podcast love this love that to be invited on the podcast too um so we started with that and that was like sort of our like testing point so we had that we We created shows with other creators, even some in-house talent around podcasts. I remember even Drift doing that back in the day, early days too.

8:54Tamara Grominsky:Newsletters. So I think that was like one of our big ones that we had to sort of be the underpinning of all the shows we were creating. It was sort of like a roundup of all the different properties. That one remains super important to like our biggest media channels, our own podcast or sorry, our own newsletter, which is tied to podcast. There was also sort of courses. That's media property. So we saw other creators out in the space creating their own courses. How do we help consolidate, give more eyeballs to them? And they would just be able to monetize after that. There were, and then there's also like video series, like, and video can be really flexible.

9:31Tamara Grominsky:And this is probably where we evolved more to was like video first production. Even with like your podcast, we call it a podcast, but there's a heavy emphasis on video clipping, making it work on YouTube and stuff like that. So I think video series became a new property that we really started to orient a lot of time into. But media can also be things like really strong infographics. You see, I know you had Anthony Pieri as one of your first guests. They built their social following off of really informative infographics. That is a piece of media. I think what I've learned, and maybe this is what I can learn into, is media network doesn't mean to be like a traditional.

10:12Tamara Grominsky:You've got all of these shows. You've got these podcasts. It's just creating unique content that resonates with your audience and meets them where they're at.

10:23Adam McQueen:I think that's important. And you and I were talking about this even before the show, which is when I often think of B2B going one way or the other. Either it's super entertaining and it's not connected to the product or the space even at all. And honestly, My First Million is kind of that if I think about HubSpot and My First Million. Like the only reason that I remember that HubSpot owns them is that like they do these little ad spots every now and then. Or then they go the other end and it's like these dry ads or these dry content, these like podcasts that you're like, I can't even sit through it.

10:56Adam McQueen:You know, I need a notebook to take to all these notes. How do you, maybe, and how have you thought about and how are you now think about deciding on a concept that's both entertaining and tied to your product narrative? Because in my opinion, that's the sweet spot and that's hard to get.

11:13Tamara Grominsky:And that's probably the things I'm most proud of that we've done in-house, whether it was like at our conference, we did a game show with our customers too, which was tied into our narrative around win-loss. And we had each person do sort of two truths and a lie of like a ridiculous loss reason the seller claimed premise. And this is maybe just ties to like your strategic narrative, which often lives with like product marketing or your product narrative of like, we just acquired a win-loss company. we launched a win-loss product we wanted to push that um problem or concept into the market really simple and we had our customers do so in a unique way it's like don't rely on your sellers for why they want or lost a deal use clue use win-loss but do it in a fun way so like that format really like helped um i think it's all starts with on those things and the ones i'm like most proud of that probably showed up most in sort of deals to revenue or like pipeline people coming in would be the things that we created that were anchored off of like really strong strategic narrative product narrative or even just like what do we know is a really big business priority right now and so i i'd say with that is you can't you can't do any of the entertaining creative stuff in my opinion well unless you have guardrails i always like creativity you need to be put in a box before to be creative like i i will refuse to show up to a meeting if you're just like adam show up and we're gonna do a brainstorm like no girl bye i'm not doing it we need to be put in confines and then create real creativity shows and i think like tight messaging gives you that box to play in that's number one have that if you don't have that then you've got bigger problems like with not problems but you have bigger things to sort out within your marketing and then from the creativity side and like getting the entertainment side I mean that's really up to the the individual one knowing your audience but two like what would I care about what would what would I give up five minutes of my time to like watch or tune into and I mean that's I feel like this might be like lazy advice for people but just take a step back and be like would I consume this Would I read this?

13:30Tamara Grominsky:Like, would I be into that?

13:33Adam McQueen:I honestly give this advice for everything in B2B marketing because I'm always so torn because so many people are like, you can't learn from B2C marketing for B2B marketing. And I disagree with that because I'm like, at its core, we are all humans. And so what I like to do is I like to just understand like, how are I making decisions throughout the day? Like, how did I decide what to order for lunch today? Why did I choose that shop over another shop? What am I going, what podcast am I like constantly listening to? Why? And so I do think you're right. And maybe what we could do is actually use like a little case study here of the ready for launch show, because I think we each probably you and I have unique perspectives of like how we came to life with the show.

14:12Adam McQueen:Maybe you could walk us through like how you guys were thinking about it from a business perspective. I could share how I was thinking about it from like a creative entertainment perspective. How does that sound?

14:21Tamara Grominsky:Yeah, let's dig into it. This will be fun because there'll be some like tactical stuff too for folks as well. Like more the nitty gritty of like kind of executing well. And this is a good example of like there's different types of content. I would say what we did with you guys. So folks, I know Ready for Launch show with Tamara, Andy and Oaks. Three great product marketing voices. And they would just break down like different types of launches, product launches that were themed. like best pre-internet launcher, best AI launch, all these different things, they would compete with one another on what it would look like.

14:55Tamara Grominsky:And I thought from Clue's perspective and us producing media, the way I looked at it was, these are three people that I think are, one, we had good relationship with. So we had existing strong relationship with you. Two, I look at folks that I want us to work with. Do they get content? Do they, there's some people out there that I'd say have good followings that and again this is where it's all subject subjectivity and what's your like what's your flavor i believed all three of you create good content and i just you can have that like okay this is someone that i think we could do something with three obviously like following do you have the right following i think that's also an important one don't just go chase someone that has a hundred thousand followers have someone that you're looking in the comments and there's other people in product marketing for example for us in your comments like having the right following those would be like three of the big like criteria we were like these this is why we want to work with you guys and i know you were doing um kind of other collabs with one another already and then we looked at it as like this one was probably more of like the brand play like i think we didn't bring clue or the problem we solved quite as much but we knew through association that we would bring in the right audience anyways produce the best content possible And this was actually our first one of gone podcast, but really emphasizing on video from thumbnails to segments, to clips, to everything around that.

16:21Tamara Grominsky:Like, how do we make sure video is prominent in what we do? And so it was probably more that than what we just talked about, about like that weaving a perfect narrative into the property you're creating.

16:31Adam McQueen:Yeah, I agree. And I think it was so fun to produce on our end as well. from our perspective when we were like, okay, same as you were like, great, a partner that we want to work with, that we believe in. Also, we all, the three of us as creators had relationships. And what I thought we had unique was we didn't want to create like a traditional interview show. There's so many of them. They're amazing. We're like, what do three of us have? That's a different dynamic. And talking about inspiration, we all loved my first million. This is not an ad for my first million, although I've dropped it a thousand times today.

17:04Adam McQueen:You can get Tamera's

17:06Tamara Grominsky:promo code at Tamera20 in the show notes.

17:09Adam McQueen:Exactly. Exactly. But like, I do like all three of us love that podcast and we would all be, you know, the three of us would basically do the show before the show existed. Like we would all just jam together. You know what I mean? And we'd be like, what are you listening to? What do you think is cool? What's on your radar? And so I think that's what we were trying to bring to the show, which was, you know, we didn't want to just yap for 30 minutes and have people be like, okay, this is not helpful. And so I do think even though it was a brand play for clue, it was still educational on the topic.

17:39Adam McQueen:You know, that's what I thought was helpful. Like we really wanted it to be, Hey, you could listen to one of our segments or all three segments and walk away with like something that you could implement in your work immediately that day. But also fun enough that you could listen to it on a walk. I didn't want someone to like have their notebook and have to be taking notes while they're listening to the podcast. But I didn't want them to not take anything away from it either, if that makes sense.

18:07Tamara Grominsky:Absolutely. And it was cool because you all brought like examples and I always work best with examples, precedents for anything we're doing. I'm like, let's go find inspo to start with. And that's like what you anchored everything on, which was so, which was what made it like really I don't know memorable it made it fun it made it lively because people might have different perspectives on the same example you brought to the table too that it was like less so just like hey give me advice on something it was like hey this is an example I hate and then someone like no I love that and it made a really interesting dynamic and I think that's probably one of the things as well when we think about like what we want to produce there's that getting personality out there getting setting up in a way where you can really have people's like um energy funniness uh like thoughtfulness like shine really stands out really really stands out that's why i like video now that's why even back in the day when we did the first podcast we put me on the road in conferences and just interviewed people in the conference because you get more like they can suddenly like know one another you get a different energy we can comment on something that happened earlier, like those, like that approach to create any of this stuff, like makes it stickier, I'd say.

19:20Adam McQueen:I would agree. I also think we did something unique with the show from a distribution perspective, which isn't always available, but I see a lot of companies create amazing content. Even I think like MailChimp has like MailChimp Presents and they have a lot of amazing media that they create. But then it's like, how do they distribute that content? and they kind of fall back on the regular B2B channels. Like I'm going to post this show on my LinkedIn page or I'm going to send it out in my newsletter. But I thought one thing that we did that other companies could steal is we created like a feedback loop with our audience.

19:56Adam McQueen:So on the show, we had a competition. So it was actually a competition between the three of us of like who brought the best example and we would vote on the show. But then after every episode, the day the episode launched, we would all three plus Clue. So it was a coordinated brand and creator effort. post on LinkedIn and ask the audience to vote. And we got a lot of engagement that way. We got feedback on what they wanted to hear in the next episode, which I think allowed us to create really interesting topics and examples. But it's like, instead of just dropping it on one traditional channel, we were able to leverage at least four channels.

20:31Adam McQueen:Plus, if you think about the employee channels of the Clue employees as well.