AudiencePlus' Anthony Kennada on building audience before a product

00:00:01:06 - 00:00:28:14

Ben Hillman

It's a beautiful day to start a garden. You carefully select the perfect spot, ensuring the soil is rich in nutrients and the area receives just the right amount of sunlight. As the seed begins to sprout, you tend to it nurturing its growth by providing the right balance water, warmth and care. You watch as it transforms into a flourishing plant, eventually bearing fruits or vegetables that nourish and delights those who partake in it.

00:00:29:02 - 00:00:55:14

Ben Hillman

Just like tending to a garden. Building an audience for your business requires similar nurturing care and understanding of the environment to ensure success in the realm of B2B SaaS. This gardening analogy is more relevant than ever. The seed is your idea. The blossoming fruits and vegetables are your product that delight your customers. But what if you could know what produce your customers wanted before planting?

00:00:55:20 - 00:01:20:07

Ben Hillman

You can learn to cultivate an audience understanding their needs and desires before planting the seed that drives your business. By doing so, you can create a fertile ground for your product to thrive, paving the way for more successful launches and long lasting customer relationships. Enter Anthony, Canada, a true connoisseur of audience cultivation, as well as the CEO and co-founder of AudiencePlus.

00:01:20:17 - 00:01:49:12

Ben Hillman

Anthony is a firm believer and the audience before product approach, emphasizing the importance of understanding your target persona and tailoring content and narrative specifically for them. In building AudiencePlus, he's had firsthand experience in figuring out what his audience wants before even announcing a product. Anthony's vast experience and knowledge in building audiences has proven to be invaluable, especially when it comes to leveraging the power of engagement across various channels.

00:01:50:15 - 00:02:24:01

Ben Hillman

In today's episode, we'll dive deep into Anthony's expertise, exploring his unique insights in audience building and discussing the benefits of prioritizing your audience before developing a product. Together, we'll uncover the secrets of nurturing your audience garden and reaping the rewards of a loyal and engaged customer base. Don't miss this insightful conversation that will undoubtedly inspire and inform your own audience growth journey from paddle its Protect to Hustle, where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B business growth to make you an outstanding operator.

00:02:24:06 - 00:02:47:22

Ben Hillman

On today's episode, Anthony Kennada talks to Andrew DAVIES about how thinking like a media company unlocks the power of your audience. They talk about the collision path towards commoditization. The principles behind building audience before product thinking like a media company to overcome a stagnant growth machine. The urgency behind Deplatforming and using distribution to unlock a commercially valuable audience.

00:02:48:04 - 00:02:58:18

Ben Hillman

After you finish the episode, check out the show notes for a look into the fundamentals of building an audience. Then, while you're leaving your five star review of the podcast, tell us what resonated most about Anthony's advice.

00:03:03:15 - 00:03:07:15

Ben Hillman

First up, Anthony talks about the collision path towards commoditization.

00:03:11:06 - 00:03:20:06

Andrew Davies

Anthony. Great to have you on Protect the Hustle. It's really fantastic to chat to you about media, about SaaS, about growth. Really appreciate you taking the time.

00:03:20:10 - 00:03:22:00

Anthony Kennada

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

00:03:22:02 - 00:03:40:21

Andrew Davies

So talk to us a little bit about the journey to this point because AudiencePlus is your current business, but you've had a rich history to get there through, gain insights and upfront and hop in and talk to me about what you've learned on those different steps and how that has led you to your bet. The next portion of your life on owned media.

00:03:41:14 - 00:04:10:05

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, So I think it starts by just thinking about how I showed up to gain site. I'd never done marketing before and Nick Madoff, who's the CEO there, who I had worked with in a previous company, sort of for whatever reason, and trusted me to come in and build marketing at the site. And so a lot of what I brought to the table, as you know, is a relatively junior marketer now going to tasked with building a brand, a demand funnel, going from 0 to 1 was first principles.

00:04:10:05 - 00:04:37:16

Anthony Kennada

So I didn't come in with like 20 years of being a veteran and paid search and demand gen. You know, you often say like CMO come for me to the demand gen school or product marketing, maybe brand and community. I was none of that. I was in came from product actually was my background before that. So using first principles, I look to a lot of what consumer brands were doing, thinking that was my exposure to marketing, was what Disney was doing, what Airbnb and some of these other folks that were kind of aspirational brands.

00:04:38:00 - 00:05:02:03

Anthony Kennada

And so we did a lot of things that were sort of maybe, you know, not not a name to best practice at the time we hosted an event when we were just a very small company that had nothing to do with our software, but everything to do with the practice of customer success, you know, exchanging best practices, building community and kind of creating this forum for people to actually meet each other and kind of grow their careers that way.

00:05:02:12 - 00:05:27:01

Anthony Kennada

And that hypothesis was sort of validated by by that first event. And then we ended up building the entire marketing engine on top of that micro brand called Pulse. That was effectively the name of the conference. And so that showed up as basically a content marketing strategy all around best practices and customer success, a global event strategy that again gathered the community around this topic virtual programs, virtual events.

00:05:27:01 - 00:05:45:19

Anthony Kennada

You know, I think, yeah, a podcast, you know, several of the things that we did as well kind of in earlier days. And I think the broad thing that I learned through that experience is if you build thought leadership as a brand and build equity into your brand, that is that doesn't just align your logo with this broader movement, which is good, We want that.

00:05:46:04 - 00:06:14:04

Anthony Kennada

It also is something you can monetize and grow into and grow as a as a, you know, revenue engine through thought leadership, which at least in 2013, 2015 was relatively novel as a concept because we're so focused on like outbound calling and buying lists and Google Pay per click and some of these other things. And so that as a strategy was something that deeply impacted me as a look, there's something, you know, really, you know, future and novel about that.

00:06:14:04 - 00:06:30:04

Anthony Kennada

But also it just feels right. So I build relationship with an audience and to kind of develop that trust and be authentic. And, you know, there's something about that. I can just go to bed at night as a marketer and be like, we're actually like creating real value and we're also able to grow as a result, which is pretty meaningful.

00:06:30:20 - 00:06:56:06

Anthony Kennada

So brought that to front a little bit, you know, that very product driven business that we started going to take steps towards that and building thought leadership and then at hop in very fast the journey that happened. But certainly I think the power of live experiences and seeing how just through the pandemic and everything, we're now using technology in a in a way to kind of foster belonging and develop thought leadership and engage audiences and communities in really interesting and new ways.

00:06:56:07 - 00:07:17:18

Anthony Kennada

So all of that has sort of shaped, you know, this this moment now and AudiencePlus where it's like, okay, there isn't really an underlying technology platform that helps make this thing possible. And so we're sort of re architecting the traditional means of growing a business, growing revenue building pipeline, all these types of things, thinking through the lens of relationship.

00:07:17:18 - 00:07:35:12

Anthony Kennada

And I'm sure we'll get into this, but we learned a lot from you all in what you have done in the sense of building an audience and you know, I think a lot of direct to consumer companies do this really well. You build an audience first, you validate a lot of these hypotheses, bring those insights into the product, and then you launch a product into that audience.

00:07:35:13 - 00:07:43:10

Anthony Kennada

And so try and try to put it into practice now and audience. Plus, as a first time founder, being a marketer before that and really excited, love it.

00:07:43:10 - 00:08:11:14

Andrew Davies

So from product to marketing, leadership and now to founder of of AudiencePlus. So I think the shared thesis that we've discussed many times before is that you know SaaS is a great monetization engine and media is a great audience builder, a relationship builder, as you said. So is that the crux of the thesis behind AudiencePlus or you know, what else the justification for this being the right time to go and launch something that enables other companies to build out their own owned media?

00:08:11:14 - 00:08:34:11

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, really good question. I think a couple of things. One, companies that are taking purely a product first or product only approach to going in market, I think that the danger there is that all products are kind of on this collision path towards commoditization like we get where it's easier to build things fast and respond to the competitive pressures.

00:08:34:11 - 00:08:54:22

Anthony Kennada

And so so your moat as a company being your product innovation, is getting challenged, I think, over time. And, you know, I think that the piece that we're learning is that having a community or however you want to kind of zoom out from that an audience that has affinity to you as a brand is a moat that's much harder to to steal, much harder to to compromise.

00:08:54:22 - 00:09:22:04

Anthony Kennada

And so I think the thesis for the company is that that still feels pretty new as an idea, at least in B2B, because SaaS were still, you know, deep and like the product hunt, like product led growth kind of narrative that's kind of dominating the headlines still today. And so it feels like we're peeking a little bit into the future by saying, hey, companies like, you know, paddle profit well and others, maybe even HubSpot, what they're doing with with the hustle are giving us a peek into kind of what's coming next.

00:09:22:13 - 00:09:42:11

Anthony Kennada

But there's still a lot of uncertainty. There still aren't. How do we actually build a media engine or how do we think about first party data and this new world without third party cookies and getting more distribution on our content? How does all this actually drive growth? Fundamentally, there's still questions to be answered and there's still technology to be built to really go solve the problem.

00:09:42:11 - 00:10:04:15

Anthony Kennada

So I think the thesis was it's I have conviction in seeing a preview of it at gain side, seeing what you and others have done, that this is what the future of marketing will look like and with more questions and product gaps than anything else in the market today, it felt like an opportunity to really go and that the time would be now to really go and bring something like this to market.

00:10:04:21 - 00:10:27:10

Andrew Davies

Love it. And there's loads of depth in there that we need to dig into. So I'll come back to a couple of things there, but let's just jump to the very end before we do that. And I always wondered this when I was thinking about Marketo and HubSpot in the early days too. So if that's true and everybody then has a justification for being a media company, what's the end result of every single software company churning out a huge amount of content?

00:10:27:10 - 00:10:32:03

Andrew Davies

Do do you think what's the logical conclusion in your mind? What everybody is an AudiencePlus customer.

00:10:32:08 - 00:10:57:13

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, I mean, more pressure to be creative, more pressure to break through the noise. It's putting the weight on marketers to market and not just produce a bunch of content that you know, is formulaic and is going to drive Garrett to a certain amount of like search traffic as a result, because that's really where what we're operating from today and at least in the traditional sense in B2B marketing, it's, you know, content is written and it's against keywords.

00:10:57:13 - 00:11:23:09

Anthony Kennada

And if a human can't read it, but Google can, then great like it better because that's going to give us what we need to hit our inbound inbound targets. And with what we're seeing this week, which at GPT and like all of these things like producing written content, it's going to get pretty commoditized over time. People are going to stop reading, but it's going to put pressure on marketers to write truly engaging editorial content that actually delivers value to an audience.

00:11:23:09 - 00:11:51:11

Anthony Kennada

And I think, you know, using emerging formats where you even say emerging with podcasts, but you know, it is still short form video, long form, live, all of these new kind of, you know, new to us at least formats are channels by which we can kind of break through the attention kind of barrier. But it's also just putting pressure to maybe kind of have this like renaissance moment for creativity and actual value creation through our content and not just a performance lens on top of it.

00:11:51:11 - 00:11:52:18

Andrew Davies

That's a great kind of pressure to have.

00:11:52:18 - 00:11:57:13

Anthony Kennada

Hey, Yeah. Oh, I welcome it. As somebody who appreciates the creative side of marketing, I welcome.

00:12:01:06 - 00:12:05:20

Ben Hillman

Next, Anthony talks about the principles behind building audience before product.

00:12:09:13 - 00:12:29:05

Andrew Davies

Very cool. So you mentioned this phrase audience before product or building the audience before you launch the product. And clearly that's what you're doing. We see other examples of that. You said your B2C do this quite well or DTC to this quite well. Adam Schoenfeld has done this recently in building a research community around PLG and Target accounts before launching a software company.

00:12:29:17 - 00:12:43:12

Andrew Davies

Talk to us about some of the principles of why you should build that audience. And, you know, that's a lot of effort is a lot of time. Yeah, ahead of monetization by the principles of that. And then also what are the challenges of actually doing that ahead of having a software company to monetize it?

00:12:43:13 - 00:13:08:20

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, I mean, well, there's a lot to say here. I mean, I think the reason the value in doing it is a the empathy that you gather from the market because now, sure, you're doing the thing that is ultimately, you know, at least in our case, that ultimately our customers are going to be doing. And so we have to get in their minds, get into their processes, test hypotheses that we had, as, you know, potential software vendors.

00:13:09:05 - 00:13:33:22

Anthony Kennada

And, you know, very quickly shift course if we're wrong, because underlying this, at least again, in our case, I think for most companies, they're doing the strategy as an engineering team. It's a product engineering team that's building something in the back end and our ability to iterate rapidly to get validation on ideas that we had. So you've got, of course, correct and make sure that we're going in the right direction or actually solving problems for our our customers is invaluable.

00:13:34:03 - 00:13:58:09

Anthony Kennada

And so you think about like customer driven product development. This is actually community driven product development, which is a very powerful, you know, concept with exponential scale relative to a small subset of design partners for an early stage business. So I think that that's the reason to do it. Partially the reason we did it was kind of a happy accident too, in that we had finished building a part of the product that was very public facing.

00:13:58:19 - 00:14:19:21

Anthony Kennada

And you know, the alternative was to sit on it for like six months, eight months, you know, And so we definitely wanted to get it out there. We wanted to start kind of testing it in real time, understanding kind of how people are using the product and all that sort of thing. So so I think in addition to sort of the value that we're getting, like I think we can actually create some value out into the market as well.

00:14:20:06 - 00:14:50:22

Anthony Kennada

And being a marketer and being going to buy off. Your last question is somewhat of a new industry. I think it's it's weird to say owned media is new, but I think at least there is this sort of new definition of it that's emerging. We want help educate the market and we want to help put the best practices out there, which isn't just us, by shining a light on, you know, what Patrick has done, you know, with you all what KIPP is doing at HubSpot, what you have so many spokes that we're able to learn from others and share their stories of being able to creation channel for for that value.

00:14:51:05 - 00:15:19:01

Anthony Kennada

It does two things and helps cement the the category a bit. And so when we do launch owned media as and just like random thing, like it's something that for months you know maybe even longer we've been actually end up talking about but it also aligns our brand with that thing. And so AudiencePlus as we know it, you know, is almost three months old in terms of what we've shown the world and we're already, you know, being cited and referenced around this idea of old media becoming a media company.

00:15:19:12 - 00:15:29:22

Anthony Kennada

I don't think you could do that in a world where you're just incubating a product for two years without telling anyone about it. And so you're building equity even if you have nothing to sell. And I think that's really powerful.

00:15:30:07 - 00:15:51:18

Andrew Davies

Very cool. So we've got the ability for content to be part of the research and community, be part of the research to define product. And then we've also got the the reach it gives you when you actually come to launch. Yeah. So have you ever seen this? Not work or have you got case studies are examples of where people have kind of gotten to early or perhaps the community has led them in a role in a different direction than there hasn't been a product they can build?

00:15:52:04 - 00:16:07:15

Anthony Kennada

I'm trying to think of anything the modern day. I mean, the one the one quote that comes up is the super cheesy Henry Ford quote about if you just ask people what they want, they say they want a faster horse. And so I think I reference that a little bit, too. Or sometimes I feel like, oh, gosh, we had a show.

00:16:07:19 - 00:16:29:06

Anthony Kennada

The thing first for them to really like push on us because conceptually or in a way, reframing this isn't giving us kind of the, I think, the real insight that we're looking for. But I can't think of any like modern, at least SaaS businesses that launched a community where the product kind of failed or product didn't. Honestly, I think it's good.

00:16:29:07 - 00:16:43:18

Anthony Kennada

It's just so novel in our space. Like I think in the DTC world, we probably we can cite a few examples of companies that maybe didn't live up to their potential, even though they have a strong community. And I think there's, you know, I feel bad calling out names, but I think there's a couple that are coming to mind.

00:16:43:18 - 00:17:07:01

Anthony Kennada

The products that ended up being, you know, not living up against their potential, but they're still kind of burgeoning around this idea and this community that's really gathered around it. So I think it's an it's important to Mary, like good product development, best practices, good company building, best practices with this strategy and not just be like fundamentally an outlier and community building and marketing.

00:17:07:01 - 00:17:11:17

Anthony Kennada

And then just like, you know, not as great on the other stuff, it has to you have to kind of focus on both.

00:17:15:08 - 00:17:21:08

Ben Hillman

And now Anthony talks about thinking like a media company to overcome a stagnant growth machine.

00:17:25:07 - 00:17:40:14

Andrew Davies

You I know you use words very carefully, and I've heard you use two different phrases. One is you've got to be a media company and the other is you've got to be like a media company. So talk to me about the difference between those two and where one or the other lens makes more sense for a SaaS business or a software business.

00:17:40:14 - 00:17:42:11

Andrew Davies

Maybe that's not on the scale of looking media.

00:17:42:11 - 00:18:04:09

Anthony Kennada

This is, by the way, something we're actively learning and testing. So I'll give you a sense of how I see those two words, but I think the jury's still out. Hopefully we'll get some good feedback, you know, from this episode for folks that give us their point of view. But the again, the marketer in me, I think there is this term called every company in its phrase, every company, I mean a media company and it's kitschy and it's like understood and spoken.

00:18:04:09 - 00:18:40:00

Anthony Kennada

And so we wanted to hook on to that train and help kind of from a place of evangelism or a place of like breaking through the noise, kind of, you know, say those words. Now, if you talk to content marketers, well, everyone's been saying this for a long time. And so there's almost like this, for lack of a better term, not disbelief, but this sort of like, okay, everyone's a media company, here we go again, type of attitude to it and so I think that the question you're asked is an important one because the risk is we are not trying ultimately to monetize our content maybe a little bit to offset some expense at your

00:18:40:00 - 00:19:02:04

Anthony Kennada

other big conference coming up, your sell tickets to it like that sort of thing. Some companies have charged for content or for research or things, other things. I think there's a reason to do it. But the fear, if you completely literally become a media company, is distraction, distraction from pipeline creation, distraction from hitting the sales target, from product marketing, right.

00:19:02:04 - 00:19:37:08

Anthony Kennada

From actually doing the things that are operationally how we make money as a SaaS business. And so I can appreciate that being concerned. I would say that folks are not would have on it. Being like a media company is a mentality. Shift means thinking about audiences, not just thinking about customers or our community. Not that we don't want to not think about customers, but thinking about how we can build audience in a modern way, how we can use content in editorial formats, not just performance marketing, and then how we can effectively move them through this funnel.

00:19:37:08 - 00:20:05:13

Anthony Kennada

And the sort of funnel analogy that comes to mind here is this idea of like a rented audience on social on Google search and owned audience, where we can actually have that direct relationship with the member of the audience and then monetized. Obviously selling products, services, customer is kind of at the bottom of that funnel that is sort of borrowing language, borrowing tactics from the media, kind of consumer media business or industry to inform how we shift our thinking as B2B marketers.

00:20:06:09 - 00:20:30:12

Anthony Kennada

There's probably more truth in that example. That's probably that's probably closer to the ten. But there's something buzzy or I don't know about the media company thing. I think there's also this strategy that a lot of companies have done of acquiring existing media companies and letting them run independently, almost like this editorial arm where we have editorial here and content marketing here.

00:20:30:18 - 00:20:54:23

Anthony Kennada

And so it might even be this maturity thing where you have large, you know, larger businesses that are kind of treating as separate entities almost or micro brands within the company. Next, you have to be determined. But I would say if you're an early to mid stage business, if you're call it 1 to 100 million of RR, you're probably focused on being more like a media company than you are actually becoming a media company because you're not you're a SaaS company that day.

00:20:55:04 - 00:21:17:13

Andrew Davies

And surely part of the issue there as well, when you're thinking like a media company, is a greater or higher quality ball, because the challenge when you're in a performance mindset is is always to serve the engine you're building. Rather perhaps to serve the end user. And one of the conversations I have that was most instructive, I had a good conversation with with Marc DiChristina from MailChimp a while back, and I asked him, What's the hardest thing?

00:21:17:13 - 00:21:33:10

Andrew Davies

You know, he's built this fantastic content media brand engine at MailChimp. What was the hardest thing about all of this? And he said, The hardest thing is actually creating something that people give a shit about, and that was that was the real difficulty. The rest of all the instrumentation and the measurement, the distribution was easy compared to that.

00:21:33:10 - 00:21:41:07

Andrew Davies

So how do you think about quality and how do you encourage people to raise the quality bar to that level rather than it just being enslaved to the growth machine?

00:21:41:23 - 00:22:02:05

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, well, sure. I mean, at least the conversations I'm having now is like we start doing something like, you know, look to a MailChimp and others and get out of just writing performance blog posts and start producing videos are producing other things. I'm seeing more 0 to 1 level conversation today, at least in the broadest sense in the industry.

00:22:02:08 - 00:22:24:01

Anthony Kennada

But I mean, absolutely, like once you start producing this stuff and yet you still, at least as a CMO or a BPO of demand, still have to show up in front of your sales team and hold account to a pipeline target or whatever it is, however you're measured, the sort of, you know, the lifecycle of that piece of content has to end up in some somewhere in the funnel to an outcome.

00:22:24:11 - 00:22:46:02

Anthony Kennada

And, you know, I think Ben has been at Idol has done an amazing job talking about this to you on LinkedIn. I'd like the currency to do that isn't just volume, it can be and it's going to get so much easier to produce like, you know, the chat DVD, all these things. So you have to push the creative boundary, creative bar, You have to actually listen to what people what are they?

00:22:46:15 - 00:23:03:17

Anthony Kennada

What are the questions that people in your audience have and how can you create content in a way that doesn't just educate them on the answers but inspires them along the way or entertains them along the way? It turns out we're all we're all humans at the end of the day, and we watch things on Netflix and Hulu and other things that we opt into.

00:23:03:17 - 00:23:25:12

Anthony Kennada

But in business, like we don't to start reading white papers on a Friday night like we should, we know we want to still be inspired and be entertained while also learning along the way. So I think one one analogy that I've given in the past is thinking about this through the lens of becoming almost like a lifestyle brand for people within your persona.

00:23:25:12 - 00:23:43:23

Anthony Kennada

You know, you sort of do life with them, you enrich their careers along the way and you're answering questions that they have, but you're doing it through a creative lens or a lens that lands with them at the very sort of emotional level. So anyway, I think that the punchline to your answer is that, like, creativity needs impact.

00:23:43:23 - 00:24:08:14

Anthony Kennada

Being able to actually deliver value will result in better customer acquisition motions because it's happening through this lens of value and relationship, not just transactional, not just buying a list and calling down that list with your BTR. It's like if you do generate leads off that, I think that cohort of leads has a higher propensity to churn or to not convert through the funnel versus folks coming in through this relationship channel.

00:24:08:14 - 00:24:15:23

Anthony Kennada

So that's a powerful kind of idea, but it is, you know, a new way of thinking about generating generating revenue.

00:24:15:23 - 00:24:40:21

Andrew Davies

And I think going back to to Mark of MailChimp, I think that was their result, was that those who come in via that top of funnel brand content, you know, have a higher chance conversion, larger basket size, etc.. And I guess the way just reflecting what you're saying there, the way I think about this is unifying that demand mindset to the media mindset, the creative mindset is that we have to know that persona and you just will use the word persona in your answer there.

00:24:41:04 - 00:25:03:12

Andrew Davies

Yeah, we've got to really care about the persona that ICP, that individual, their pains, their needs, and then we've got to let our creative teams absolutely rip on making experiences for them that count. And I think the danger is when you go, we're in one ditch where we're too focused on this ICP and this persona and delivering them really mediocre content or were over here doing insanely creative things.

00:25:03:12 - 00:25:09:08

Andrew Davies

That's just too, too broad an audience that we can actually convert that. And when you unify those two, that's when you've got real magic.

00:25:09:12 - 00:25:31:06

Anthony Kennada

So powerful, so popular, too many companies that haven't done the upfront work to understand their their personas or to get really, really deep on on who they're selling to. But a marketing and selling to and or product driven businesses that are leading with innovation but don't have a home for that value creation. So I fundamentally agree. I think that's absolutely kind of the that were the magic for all this can happen to.

00:25:34:19 - 00:25:38:06

Ben Hillman

Next Anthony talks about the urgency behind De-platforming.

00:25:41:22 - 00:26:06:16

Andrew Davies

So in your AudiencePlus kind of media engine you're already building one of the things you're doing when the series you're running owned is talking to media companies themselves about their tactics and channels and their, you know, strategies that they've built up. So you talked to POPSUGAR, Morning Brew, Barstool Sports, a couple of others. Perhaps you can just summarize maybe a learning for each of those so that we can know we'll get to those in the show now just so we can highlight for the listeners.

00:26:06:16 - 00:26:22:20

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, sure. I'll give you a quick just behind the scenes too. We were inspired by President Gage. Tear down on this idea like this was not goes PC is often talked about like franchises or looking at consumer kind of example was and bringing those in and I found that I was just doing an interview show which is great.

00:26:22:20 - 00:26:42:16

Anthony Kennada

We need to do interview shows which we call Media House, and we wanted to experiment with a format that looked at consumer media sites and sort of tore them down respectfully, of course, and in a way that doesn't create enemies out in the market and apply those learnings to B2B companies. And so, yes, probably it's actually the most we get the most engagement off that show so far in our three month history.

00:26:42:16 - 00:27:02:18

Anthony Kennada

It's very new, but that is our top program and there's so, so many learnings, right. And that we just didn't have. So we're launching next week with Liquid Death, which is another one which they've done such incredible things on, on the own media side. Some of the learnings, what's interesting is there is a pattern we see in the consumer media space that is kind of forming our hypothesis for B2B.

00:27:03:01 - 00:27:23:22

Anthony Kennada

The first is each of these platforms call it barstool, I'll call it POPSUGAR, whoever has this idea of a rented and owned strategy. So they are doing things in the social channels, they're using short form video. They're doing a lot to be sort of have a steady cadence of release of content to be relevant to their audience in the channels where their audiences are.

00:27:24:00 - 00:27:51:03

Anthony Kennada

However, they also have an own strategy. They are actively trying to deplatformed that audience from social into an owned database where they can then have that direct relationship with beyond where their audience comes in the form of a newsletter, or it comes in the form of just being a member of their community and you can have a logged in sort of access to community and special events and experiences and merch and different things that are just for that folks within their own space.

00:27:51:08 - 00:28:20:19

Anthony Kennada

So that's kind of one kind of big, big trend that we're seeing. The second I a fun one, I hit on this a little bit. Each one of them have a merch strategy. It's so weird in that it's not merch from the like company branded like, you know, here's an AudiencePlus T-shirt type of a thing. But it's it's sort of the idea of creating almost FOMO around a specific piece, physical good diet, clothing or tchotchkes at your desk or something, and creating scarcity around that.

00:28:20:19 - 00:28:42:07

Anthony Kennada

And people that want it want to be in on the inside joke. And I think that's where brands are getting really smart. Is that the piece of content is an insider point of view. It's an inside it's it's a phrase that is an insider phrase. It's a something that by buying it or getting that good, they are sort of, you know, they belong to this community or this way of thinking.

00:28:42:15 - 00:29:02:17

Anthony Kennada

And so Yung Liquid Death has this like candle that they did. They have a bunch of things of Halloween costume lunchboxes like artwork, random random stuff, and they don't use it again as sort of this free thing. But it's almost like a store. It's an e-commerce business within each of these media brands. And one one last thing I'll call out is they use some of these things in order to grow their audience.

00:29:02:17 - 00:29:27:08

Anthony Kennada

And so Morning Brew is probably the masterclass for folks to study is morning Brew. It's pretty amazing what what the team has done there. They built a referral network for their newsletter where if you refer a certain amount of people, you get an insider piece of merch as a means of that, and that generated tremendous growth in their kind of owned audience just by incentivizing around some piece of some fun thing that the piece of scarcity, you know, to them.

00:29:27:08 - 00:29:52:19

Anthony Kennada

So we're learning a lot and it's just so mind blowing. As a B2B marketer who said I don't know where my at 1213 years now and this industry thinking there's a whole other world out there that are doing really innovative things that none of us are touching yet and it's working. So it's like a gold mine if we're able to like again be like a media company, I got to think I'm sort of convincing myself that might be the that where we end up landing on this thing.

00:29:53:07 - 00:30:00:11

Anthony Kennada

But to start pulling some of those practices into how we go to market as B2B brands, it's like what we're an opportunity to stand out right now.

00:30:00:13 - 00:30:17:23

Andrew Davies

And love it. Love it. Used a word there, De-platforming I know you've talked about this a little bit and, you know, this is, I assume, the process of bringing people from a rented, rented platform on to an own platform. So explain that a bit deeper for everyone. The why behind it, why it's essential, why is urgent, and then what's the benefits of doing that?

00:30:18:00 - 00:30:50:11

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, you know, one thing we're seeing is our relationship with social media is changing. And if you've been paying any attention to what's going on with Ellen and Twitter and again, everyone has a different point of view on that topic, but we can all agree that things are changing. And I think, again, it starts as I think with most of this conversation from consumer world where creators have grown frustrated that their organic reach is being governed by an algorithm that they don't control, and so they can post something and try to play to the algorithm by diluting their message in order to try to get reach.

00:30:50:11 - 00:31:12:04

Anthony Kennada

We're feeling this now by post something on LinkedIn with a word link in comments and the description. I get about half the impressions that I get if I don't. And so that where our eyes are opening on the creator side and now on the brand side is that these are like ad based networks that make their money on using you and your network, your followers and your content in order to generate revenue.

00:31:12:11 - 00:31:37:09

Anthony Kennada

They don't want you leaving that platform. They want you to stay on platform. So observation number one is these, you know, we're not declaring war or anything on LinkedIn, Twitter. And along those lines, but they're not for you really. And we need to be aware of that. And the second piece is or the counter kind of intuitive part of this is that our audiences are they're like, they're on TikTok, they're on LinkedIn, they're on Twitter.

00:31:37:13 - 00:31:58:04

Anthony Kennada

And so we can't not have a play there. We can't not have a strategy that shows for us to show up in these rented channels. And it goes beyond to social. By the way, think of the third party content networks like YouTube, like Apple, Podcasts, like Spotify. It's it's a very similar approach. And if you think I'm wrong, ask them for the email addresses of all of your followers and see if I'll give them to you.

00:31:58:19 - 00:32:19:20

Anthony Kennada

And even if they gave them to you, you don't have the legal consent to actually you know them right? They have an afternoon. So the underlying fabric of this thing is broken. And so we need to think about targeted strategies in these rented channels that do a few things. Most of them, honestly, are probably zero click. They're probably awareness.

00:32:20:06 - 00:32:46:16

Anthony Kennada

They're probably just being relevant and being this hot sort of company that is producing value for the audience, that is generating some type of virality or growth and followership. And that just is it's like NBC or it's any network. It's like you're active, you're very relevant and you're creating real value. However, where possible, the goal would be to try to take that audience off of LinkedIn or Twitter or everything else into your own database.

00:32:46:16 - 00:33:02:18

Anthony Kennada

And you can do it in a few ways that I think sort of game the algorithm back against some of the networks. That's kind of I think the success that we've been seeing so far with AudiencePlus is sort of de-platforming. Our LinkedIn audience mostly are using LinkedIn kind of strategically to pull that audience into our sort of subscriber database.

00:33:03:06 - 00:33:18:20

Anthony Kennada

You know, you can some of the things we do is we talk often about some of the exclusive content that we have just for subscribers and we promote them in the third party networks. In some cases, we just go over the LinkedIn comments and get less reach, but we get a ton of engagement with those that we do reach.

00:33:19:05 - 00:33:44:17

Anthony Kennada

In other cases, again, we try to like play with it and it's always kind of guys under. But I think that what we've seen from things like Patreon, from Substack, from others is that there is this movement happening to go and own your own data. And if you're a B2B company and you know, third party cookies are going to be completely gone, I think it's now 2020 for like there's nothing more important than capturing that data.

00:33:44:17 - 00:34:04:12

Anthony Kennada

So you can actually size your audience and be able to distribute content into them, but then understand how are they engaging with all of your stuff in order to a, make smarter decisions about the type of content you are producing in what formats and what you know on what topics that sort of thing. And then also that connection to to value creation and ultimately revenue.

00:34:04:12 - 00:34:15:14

Anthony Kennada

So we have to deplatform it's not easy. We're swimming upstream against it or flying it into the wind, but I think it's pretty central to any consumer media company, at least I think we have the very way to do in our world.

00:34:19:02 - 00:34:24:08

Ben Hillman

And now Anthony talks about using distribution to unlock a commercially valuable audience.

00:34:28:02 - 00:34:49:14

Andrew Davies

And so that process of De-platforming clearly is a pillar of any good modern distribution strategy we've talked about before how, you know, the content itself is only half the work. It's the distribution that really is making the balance. So how do you think about distribution and particularly what you've talked about in terms of zero click and in platform formats?

00:34:49:14 - 00:34:55:19

Andrew Davies

So how do you think about distribution in all of these different places that have got to aggregate an audience that's then commercially valuable?

00:34:55:21 - 00:35:16:08

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, it's a great question, and I think that's sort of the part of the problem set that we think audience plays as a real opportunity to help solve because there's low rate tools, like you mentioned Riverside and Canva and, you know, Hop and Stream Yard, all these different tools are making it easier to create content. The Gap I think, is figuring out this problem.

00:35:16:08 - 00:35:46:08

Anthony Kennada

So what I would say is this I think there is. I think first of all, we still fundamentally undervalue email as probably the main channel for driving engagement, but actual and deep engagement with our audiences. You know, I've seen that come to life with like events where if you want to drive registration to an event, you can do all you want on social, probably get a limited, limited amount of registration, but the second you email your database, you know, with an offer or with a compelling kind of reason to register it, that's where the real kind of engagement happens.

00:35:46:19 - 00:36:14:09

Anthony Kennada

And so I think that one of the benefits to an owned audience is like building that relationship through email. That is a very powerful distribution force. The second bit that is like, okay, the way we've done that historically has been through kind of one too many campaigns. We've got our newsletter that goes out and it doesn't matter what role Jane Doe has or company size, what problems contextually that she cares about, she gets the same email that everyone gets.

00:36:15:01 - 00:36:39:13

Anthony Kennada

And I think, you know, our ability to be personalized through email and other channels with how we sort of present content or present different kind of solutions is ultimately a better way to to get distribution. The other piece that people talk about, about this whole, you know, thing is repurposing. And so producing one piece of content, be at this podcast or what have you, and then repurposing this into so many different channels.

00:36:39:13 - 00:37:01:17

Anthony Kennada

We're recording on video today using video as a means of creating kind of short form assets that ultimately are are driving people to that, to listen to the download or to download the episode. There's all of these are, I think, different ways for us to get more out of what we're doing versus just doing more. And I think that thinking through the repurposing kind of framework is is important.

00:37:02:02 - 00:37:18:13

Anthony Kennada

But I think that the novel part of this is all of these things are working together not just to get more followers and more likes, but all of these things working together to drive more folks into your own audience. You can then kind of build this bigger and better relationship with.

00:37:18:15 - 00:37:36:07

Andrew Davies

So from a resourcing perspective, and they'll be loads of SaaS founders and marketers listening to this. It feels like there are a bunch of different pretty niche skills in every single platform to understand the algorithm, the distribution. Have you ever found someone who understands it across all of these different platforms, or is that where a system comes into play?

00:37:36:09 - 00:37:41:10

Andrew Davies

Or is it about each channel only knowing they're sold rather than it being something that can be centrally controlled?

00:37:41:11 - 00:38:13:21

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, it's it's a really good question. I think that I don't think there are many folks in the traditional B2B marketing team that have this sort of specialization across every every platform. We like community managers on social and that sort of thing, but it's a little different than than audience building, right? And so I think yeah, I think we talked about this a while ago as a lot of folks are starting to hire that specialization from like the creator space kind of coming in-house into B2B marketing teams, folks that fundamentally understand how do you create content for these different channels in order to actually get engagement?

00:38:14:07 - 00:38:40:23

Anthony Kennada

Because what we do on TikTok is much different than what we do on obviously LinkedIn or some of these other channels. Understanding those nuances is really important. I think what I'd advocate for quite selfishly is thinking about all of that through the lens of amplification, but then becoming your own channel for distribution. And HubSpot. Dharmesh has talked often about this like become becoming, owning that distribution, becoming a channel I think is the ultimate space, the ultimate place.

00:38:40:23 - 00:39:08:06

Anthony Kennada

We want to get to. But thinking through or having someone on the team who understands audiences, audience development and being able to pull concrete content for those channels that pull kind of engagement back into your own space, I'd say is is probably pretty exciting, like role. And if that's someone that knows how to do that really well, I imagine that's going to be one of the big hiring kind of the things that people look for in B2B marketing, hiring and in the short term here, super interesting.

00:39:08:06 - 00:39:25:19

Andrew Davies

So let's try and give some real value as we close this out to some of the people in the audience who are listening who perhaps, you know, are in that 0 to 1 phase that you started off describing. You know, they've currently been blogging to make sure they're involved, strategies working and, you know, running the lead scoring and hopes for Marketo and then how to give it to sales.

00:39:26:04 - 00:39:37:17

Andrew Davies

And they're hearing you and saying, this sounds like a brave new world. What are the few things that they need to be doing as they go into their next weeks or months to start actually, you know, putting in place this media strategy?

00:39:37:17 - 00:40:09:18

Anthony Kennada

Yeah, I mean, I think we start by by doing just kind of here, but I think you have to just come up with a concept. And then I think if you're listening to this interview, the conversation we had about understand your personas and important probably precursor a lot of this, but if you can deeply empathize with a portion of your market and you have a story that's worth telling and you sort of like thought about the messaging sort of crystallized a bit of the story, do a show, whatever that is, launch a podcast, launch a video interview series, do this, take the first step.

00:40:09:18 - 00:40:32:06

Anthony Kennada

And, you know, we're writing a lot about like, hey, it's actually becoming easier to produce relatively high quality content with tools like Riverside and what we're using today with you at home, audio equipment, like whatever it is, like, you can actually get pretty decent quality without having to break the bank. And so you don't need to like wait until you get, you know, several hundred thousands of dollars of budget in order to start this thing.

00:40:32:06 - 00:40:53:01

Anthony Kennada

You can start pretty pretty quickly and easily and focus on that value creation for for your audience and then experiment with these amplification kind of, you know, channels. That's what we're doing. We're we're a marketing team of two right now. You don't count me and we're producing, you know, one video, we're publishing one video every week. We're publishing two blog posts every week.

00:40:53:01 - 00:41:13:03

Anthony Kennada

One is editorial in nature. One is more SEO kind of, you know, focus. We're doing a newsletter every week in a monthly roundup, so you can do a lot of damage with a very small team. But we're doing it through the lens of learning like what channels work for us. Like we didn't know about the don't say link in comments on LinkedIn thing until we did it and were like, Oh geez, okay, got it.

00:41:13:04 - 00:41:30:23

Anthony Kennada

Like, now we know we didn't know that we could produce like a video asset, short form video asset on Tik-tok and we have like 15 followers and it gets like hundreds of thousands of engagements because it's not a social graph, it's this interest graph. And we're learning about that. We're learning how that, you know, drives value back to to the business.

00:41:30:23 - 00:41:56:11

Anthony Kennada

And so I just encourage you to really understand your persona and your and develop the story for them. Come up with one show idea. Don't spend a lot of money on it. Get out there and start doing it and learn. And I think that's kind of the big takeaway from all of this is, you know, you'll pick up on kind of what is your audience saying back to you and how how are they helping validate a lot of both your narrative as well as the medium by which you're delivering that narrative and you'll get better at it over time?

00:41:56:11 - 00:42:17:07

Anthony Kennada

I mean, I feel bad you guys watch back pieces. First interview. That piece piece was our first guest on the first interview I've ever done for AudiencePlus. And I'm like, Man, I sucked. I was so bad and I'm not great now at all. But I you can feel yourself almost like starting to build a muscle around being on camera or being behind the mic.

00:42:17:08 - 00:42:24:15

Anthony Kennada

The more you do it, it's a really want Gersh folks to just get started and don't aim for perfection. You're going to, you know, get better over time.

00:42:24:15 - 00:42:36:04

Andrew Davies

I love it. Learn by doing you've you've ended this with a great marketing call to action. So thank you so much for your time out today. Exactly. Appreciate all the wisdom but yeah, thank you for spending the time walking through the details of that for everyone on the call course.

00:42:36:04 - 00:42:36:21

Anthony Kennada

Thanks for having us.

00:42:38:16 - 00:43:01:09

Ben Hillman

It's a massive thank you to Anthony for being on the show. Now you know what it takes to build an audience. Today we talked about the collision path towards commoditized fashion, the principles behind building audience before product thinking like a media company to overcome a stagnant growth machine. The urgency behind De-platforming and using distribution to unlock a commercially valuable audience.

00:43:01:16 - 00:43:15:19

Ben Hillman

Make sure to give Protect the Hustle a five star review, and tell us what lesson Anthony taught you from today's episode. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, a podcast from Battle Studios dedicated to helping you build better SaaS.