Become the top resource for your ICP

Dave Gerhardt is a legend in marketing circles. And this weekend his newsletter was just so full of nearbound marketing goodness, we had to highlight it.

He opened up his newsletter with two sturdy statements:

This is my favorite B2B marketing strategy: become the top resource for your ideal customer.

Being the best resource for your prospects and customers is the most effective and defensible way to take over a category, IMO.

Becoming your ICP’s top resource comes down to three ingredients:

• A strong POV

• Become your own publisher to distribute that POV, and show up regularly and consistently with new things to say, new resources for people to learn from

• Make your customers and early adopters the stars of your marketing

Sounds pretty similar to some nearbound principles. 😉

But the formula is simple, not easy.

Marketing tactics of the past focused on creating campaigns in a silo, then distributing them through rented channels. It was all a bit disconnected from the customer.

What Dave Gerhardt and the broader concept of nearbound marketing support is a move back to the customer.

Instead of product marketing, take a narrative stand. Instead of silos, build community. Instead of making your company the center of everything, make your evangelists famous.

Nearbound marketing is just human marketing.

Keep reading to hear how Logan Lyles uses nearbound to make socials 10x more effective.

5 steps to win at nearbound social

Nearbound marketing is about becoming customer-obsessed.

It’s not enough to target or attract the customers you want. Nearbound marketing is about surrounding them with the people they trust.

Nearbound social, a branch of nearbound marketing, is about creating and distributing content across social media channels with your nearbound evangelists.

It used to be that you’d create and distribute content through social channels by yourself. Now even social is a collaborative task.

Marketers are used to going to market through their channels. In the Nearbound Era, they’ll have to learn to go to market with evangelists.

Here’s Logan Lyles’ 5-step framework to winning at nearbound social:

1. Identify your nearbound evangelists
   Internal evangelists include employees, executives, and advisors. External evangelists include creators, influencers, partners, and even your customers.

2. Evaluate — are these the right people?
   To evaluate, you can use the acronym E-A-R:
   Expertise 
   Audience 
   Readiness

3. Activation
   Evangelism should have an official activation. Start with a kickoff, set expectations, and provide training. Evangelists aren’t set-it-and-forget-it. Your evangelists are active participants in your marketing strategy.

4. Distribute
   Ask for commitment to share ahead of time then, when the time comes, make it easy for your evangelists to share.

5. Track
   Measure results both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Creating and distributing with your evangelists means that sometimes these campaigns will take longer. That’s okay.

Which one would you rather have: a campaign that’s shipped in 3 weeks, but only gets 300 impressions on socials? Or a campaign that’s shipped in 5 weeks, gets 1k impressions, and generates real interest for your product?

When you include nearbound evangelists, your content performs better.

Take a look at this example from Logan’s session.

Listen to the session and get the slides here.

Martech stats point to the Nearbound Era

The godfather of martech, Scott Brinker, shared an impressive stat from the Marketing Ops’ State of Marketing Ops report.

The question was: What are your most important criteria when evaluating new marketing technology?

Integrations have become table stakes by a large majority.

Now that the assumption is that you’re integrating, the next step is evolving the operational layer of partnerships. What we’ll see next is nearbound GTM.

It’s the natural progression.

Integrations opened the door to a seamless user experience. Nearbound go-to-market is the connective tissue that’ll actually make the process seamless.

Download the report here.

Stuff you don’t want to miss!

• Nearbound Summit 2023 Recordings—The future of GTM is Nearbound. Watch the recordings to hear how B2B leaders across departments unite with Nearbound strategies and tactics. Listen here.

• TODAY—Nov 29, 2 PM EST—WTF is a System Integrator?— Join Omair Rana, Former Microsoft Director of Partner Strategy, and Scott Pollack, CEO at Firneo, and get ready to demystify System Integrators (SIs) and their pivotal role in the tech world. Register here.

• Nov 30, 1 PM - 4 PM EST —The CRO Playbook: How to fix sales in 2024— The old sales playbooks don’t work. Join GTM Partners for their Leadership Summit. CROs, CEOs, and sales leaders will unite to define how to fix sales in time for 2024 SKO. Register here.

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