Inside the Process of Going Viral in B2B - Balancing Creativity, Experimentation and Process

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today, we are talking about achieving great results at the intersection of product marketing, content marketing and podcasting, and we have a fantastic guest to help us talk through this today, mallory, welcome to the show.

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Hey, thanks, eric, so glad to be here.

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So why don't we start off by you taking a minute or two to share a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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Yeah, so I am a 10 year systems and ops veteran turned marketer and I really ended up here because I have a passion for high performance and I like to think of myself as a high performer and I think that used to sound pretty egotistical to say.

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But 10 years later and I'm still getting those high performance.

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You know reviews and so I feel pretty confident in sharing that and I think just having that mindset has allowed me to do incredible marketing in the last two years and just really grow into being a marketer after a decade in operations, so super stoked to be here and to talk about it.

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Awesome.

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I'm excited to dig into this because process and operations is actually a really big part of B2B marketing these days.

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As I've run really big marketing teams, I've had very sophisticated marketing operations teams that have kept the trains running for me, and I've even had what some people would call my own CTO within marketing, because there's so many systems and so much technology and integration that if you don't have really great people on your team doing that, you can't be successful in this golden age of marketing technology, as I like to call it.

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So I'm excited to dig into your transformation and what you've been able to do here.

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You're also a podcast host, right.

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You have your own podcast inside the process, right?

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Yeah, that's correct.

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Yep, we dig into all of our process, best practices and secrets that make people incredible at what they do.

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So let's jump in.

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We're ready to be inspired.

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Tell us a story about some of the best marketing that you've done during this transformation that you're the most proud of.

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Yeah, my journey, like I said, started less than two years ago in the marketing world and I was doing business acquisitions and process operations and continuous improvement and helping to grow a PEO firm, and I just needed to bring on a tool that would help us document the things that we were doing.

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So, when these companies would come in these businesses that we were acquiring and these people, they have systems that they could learn from and just fell in love with the product and with the team.

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I met with their CEO and he said, hey, I have this you know, crazy idea.

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What if you came on to the marketing team?

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And I was like that would be insane.

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I've done operations and continuous improvement for as long as I can remember, since I was a teenager, and so I just felt like it would be such a huge shift.

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But there was something in my gut that told me this was the right team and the right people.

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And I think to your point, that's really what it comes down to is just making sure that, no matter what you want to do whether it's operations or whether it's marketing that you have the right people around you to help you grow into it, to help you experiment and get creative and do new things and just grow as a human being.

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And so I was just really stoked about the team and I said it doesn't really matter what I'm doing, I just want to work with this team whether it doesn't really matter what I'm doing, I just want to work with this team.

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And so I first fell in love with the team, but then I absolutely 100% fell in love with marketing, and so all of the marketers out there that are listening right now they know that they've probably fallen into marketing or it found them in a sense that I think marketing really found me, but I definitely have a love for it now.

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I've gotten to do so many incredible things like GTMs and social content and comms.

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I've built communities.

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I've launched a customer advisory board.

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I've gotten to support our events that we've done.

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We've done massive events.

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We have playbook coming up.

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I've gotten to pilot our influencer program and support our newsletter, overhaul our review and referral program, and so I've done like literally anything you could think of as a marketer.

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But the two things that I'm most proud of, or the things I think are really cool for people, would be our socials.

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So if you are out on Instagram or on LinkedIn.

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You may have seen us because we're one of the only people on LinkedIn that are sharing memes and reels.

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We're trying to be the first to do it and people just really latched onto it because I think that content doesn't have to be boring.

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On LinkedIn, it can be fun and funny and still relatable, and we're doing the same thing on IG.

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So less than a year ago actually I think this month it'll be one year we were at about 24,000 followers and we just could not move the needle, like nothing was getting us over that line.

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We're trying all different types of content and clips and just things that we could do, and our CMO said hey guys, I have this crazy idea what if we turned our page into something that's like super funny and entertaining?

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And we were all a little hesitant to do that as a product that's just so critical for business operations and we want people to still take us seriously.

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But we were able to find this beautiful magic between being funny and entertaining and also serving a purpose and relating to people's pain points that we can solve, and so that's just been beautiful that everything we've shared still has a purpose and is still something that we relate to and our product offerings are solving these problems that people are poking fun at on social media is solving these problems that people are poking fun at on social media, and so we're really proud that this month we crossed 60,000 followers on IG, which is like a massive footprint across our socials.

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And then I think the other really big thing that we're really proud of is we launched a podcast, and so we talked about that already a little bit, but our podcast Inside the Process takes people deep inside of the processes that we're asking them to document.

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I think one of the biggest pain points that our customers come to us with is hey, I would love to document my business and my processes, but I don't even know if I'm doing this thing the right way or if this is the best way, and I'd hate to put that on paper where everybody's doing the same thing and not leave room for experimentation or doing things better.

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So this podcast really aims to find the best people to learn from and we hope that you walk away with essentially like a free, very expensive consulting hour with us where you can go and execute these processes beautifully and make improvements and do all the things.

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But at the end of the day.

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I think the common theme here is that no amount of process overrides your need to experiment and be creative and try new things.

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It's just when you find a way that works really well for you and gets you results, it's time to document it, start working on something else and you can always come back to that later to improve.

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Yeah, I think the full circle story here is that this ops girl turned a marketer has really found the balance between process and creativity, and it's just a beautiful place to be.

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The balance between process and creativity.

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I love it.

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That's great.

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I think that all the things you mentioned that you've been doing in marketing in the last several years inside the process of that marketing, all of those things really require you to have a great process to make it scalable and repeatable and to grow to triple your following in social media, for example, you had to have a playbook and a process that you were repeating over some period of time to do that.

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Absolutely.

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Yes, there was so much experimentation that happened in those two years among all of those things that I mentioned, but once we really locked it down, the only way that I, as the manager of our team, can step out of those things and start to build other areas of the business is to be able to delegate that to someone on my team or hire on more people that can help.

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I'm actually hiring right now, and so in order to be able to do that, I have to have these things documented, the best practices, and that doesn't mean that someone can't come in and make suggestions for improvement and we can continue to grow and build, but you have to have that foundation.

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It's the core of where I started in the continuous improvement and Lean Six Sigma world is if you don't have a current state, you can't plan for the future.

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Lean Six Sigma world is if you don't have a current state, you can't plan for the future.

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Yeah, and even with your podcast, I assume you have a similar process to consistently put out good episodes that are helpful and help the company and the brand.

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Absolutely.

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We have everything from a project task that we have in Asana, with all the steps, to everything documented in Trainual for how those communications play out and all the different steps that we have to take to make sure that we produce a great episode.

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It's definitely what I like to call the content machine, and in order to have a content machine, you have to have everything documented.

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Yeah, and I found that with this podcast the number one marketing podcast in the world I have basically created a really good process.

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I have seven different technology tools that I use and I have been able to produce 160 episodes this year an army of one and I think the episodes are pretty good myself, if I don't say so.

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I have this process where I have a process for inviting people, I have a process for sharing details before the show, I have a process for doing the show and producing it and then promoting it afterwards, and if you have that process, repeating it and scaling it is easier to do after.

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Crucially, like you said, you've experimented and found what really works.

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So what are some of the things you've learned in doing experimentation in the last two years?

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What has made your experimentation successful?

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Oh, that's a good one, I think.

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Probably the biggest thing and some people might roll their eyes at this because it's a little cliche, but it's just, I think the fearlessness to be able to fail.

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And I think sometimes we can get on teams where they preach about innovation and experimenting and all of these buzzwords, but then when someone fails, it's all eyes on them.

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It's not really a learning experience, it's maybe a slap on the hand or whatever the case may be, and we celebrate failure here and it's oh, that didn't work, but what did we learn from it?

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And the energy stays just as high and just as incredible for an experiment that didn't work as one that did work.

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And it really helps us to move the needle farther, faster and more collaboratively together, where no one operates out of fear.

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Everybody operates out of just trying to make an impact, and I think that's probably the answer to that one.

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I think that's great.

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What I have seen is that if you have that culture where you allow your team to take some risk, you can get the rewards of people being brave.

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To use your example of the social media, it was probably a little bit of a risk to go out there and be doing memes and reels that are funny because maybe it doesn't land right, maybe you don't triple your following on social media.

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So it does require, perhaps, a culture where you empower your team to be brave, but if you don't take those risks, you don't get the rewards.

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Absolutely.

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And also, if that one failed, it was on our CMO, so who cares?

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Just blame the CMO.

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That's a great.

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I think that the other thing about it is, in running marketing teams over the years, the beauty of experimentation is if you test things at a smaller scale and you refine it before you go big, then you have the privilege of being able to be wrong on more things if you're not going all in without having tested things and proved it and then do a step function up.

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So I like to think about it as a CMO.

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Okay, I need to be right not about every single thing with a team that we do, but I should probably be right 80 or 90% of the time.

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And that 10, 20% of the time you're not right would be when you experiment.

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If you do it in a small way, even if small experiments don't work, your things you've already scaled will be the super majority of the equation.

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But being brave enough to test that 10 or 20% and having the agreement with the rest of the leadership team and the company that, hey, we're going to be a little bit brave, we're going to risk let's call it 10, 20% to try to get those outsized rewards.

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Most CEOs and growth companies I've worked at have been really comfortable with that.

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Did you guys have a similar sort of understanding or experience at Trainual.

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Yeah, so the thing about our team is that it's really comes down to our core values, and so one of our core values is making ideas happen, and another one is no red tape, and another one is experiences, and these core values are preached in our performance reviews and in our Slack channels and people use them in everyday conversation and leaders are living into them, and so I feel like there's never this like reservation of am I allowed to do this in the company, because it is the foundation that our company is built on.

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And so if we shared five funny reels and a couple people were mad about it and we lost a thousand followers and it was a mess, nobody's going to like freak out and bat an eyelash at it, but that's not what happened.

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We shared five reels and the first three were maybe duds, and then by the fourth or fifth they took off, and I think into the second week we had one that took off and hit a million impressions and that was unheard of for us.

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We'd never had content that took off and went viral like that, and now we joke about it that every two weeks we have one or two posts that go mega viral and reach that, and so it's we don't even think about it anymore.

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We're just like, oh yeah, that's normal for us and it's you never know what you're capable of.

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And then once you reach that, that threshold, right.

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So now it's like we have content going viral all the time.

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We're thinking about okay, now what's the next thing?

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What's the next big thing for us?

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It's going to take us from the 60 that we hit to 100,000 audience size, and so I have no idea the answer to that question.

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But I'm really excited to experiment and to dig in, and I have no doubt or fear or hesitancy in my mind that the CMO, my leader, our VP of marketing, I have no reservations that they're going to be like shooting down ideas or not letting us experiment, or I'm not going to be worried that they're going to suppress our ideas or what have you, and I just feel like your leaders really have to live the core values and create that safe space for innovation and creativity within the foundation of your culture.

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Yep, absolutely so.

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The fact that you have those core values enables the experimentation because it's not a political environment and because of that you and the others at the company are empowered to take small risks and the fact that people don't get upset if everything is not absolutely perfect and amazing all the time is the sort of culture you need, I think, to be successful with experimenting.

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I've worked at companies in the past where if one little thing is wrong, people would run down the hall and pound on the desk.

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This email wasn't great.

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And I'm like, okay, yeah, that email wasn't great, it's one out of thousands and you want every email to be great.

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But if you have a culture where you can try new things, sometimes everything doesn't land Like you're saying.

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You had a few posts that didn't go viral, right, and now, because you're allowed to experiment, you can get those great results.

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That's the sort of culture that I think leaders should set up with their companies if they want to be successful in achieving growth.

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The focus on certain channels has changed in the last let's call it, five years, and it's interesting because it's being driven by unit economics.

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The things that worked five years ago are too expensive today in a lot of ways as a marketing investment and people are shifting into newer channels such as podcasting and YouTube, because these content channels are a lot more cost effective and have a higher return on investment than some of the other channels.

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For example, Google advertising has just become really expensive at $40 a click.

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Google advertising has just become really expensive at $40 a click.

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So some of the things like having a really great podcast and having a really great YouTube channel it's a different economic investment sort of thesis for marketing.

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So my question is in launching the podcast at your company and doing a really good YouTube channel, what have you learned doing that over the last couple of years?

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I think you actually just said it.

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You nailed it twice.

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The first is when you said one out of a thousand, and I want to highlight that for a second, because when you have a culture of people that are doing I don't know 50 experiments and maybe 40 of those fail, but 10 of those were really awesome it's really hard to notice the stuff that's not working when you have so many good things that that are working, and then you can start pouring more resources and investment into those things.

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And so I would say that if you're pounding the table about the email, that wasn't right, like, really think about what that means for your culture and the growth of your company.

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If people are so focused on something, so such a small failure, you don't really have very many good things to celebrate or other good things that are keeping your attention, and I'd be really concerned, and so I think it's really important that you do have 1000 things going on.

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So if there are 100 things that aren't working, no one really cares, and I think the other thing that I've learned, that you also nailed, is the organic side of it, and so that's actually why I was brought in for our organic awareness channel, and then there's a different team that works on paid advertising and all of the really expensive stuff that you're talking about.

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But we really do have this unique opportunity and it's one of the reasons that I'm hiring on my team to invest in YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and creating additional social channels.

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So one of the really cool things that we do is not just have our trainual main social page, but we've done some sub pages, like one for our podcast and another for tips and tricks about our product, and so we've got all these different like sub pages that can go out there and maximize our reach out into the social sphere, and so it's just really figuring out the most effective and efficient ways to maximize these channels that are absolutely free to use.

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So it takes us maybe five minutes to put together a reel on CapCut or whatever tool we want to use for our trending reel, and as long as I know the product really well, I can create a relatable caption for that reel.

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Post it on Instagram.

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That hits 1.5 million people.

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I'm actually using a reel experience from over the weekend.

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It took us not very many minutes to put this thing together.

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It hit 1.5 million people over the weekend and think about how low the investment was on that, and so what I've really learned is just keep experimenting, keep trying things and try to be as efficient and effective as possible.

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Awesome advice.

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Any final thoughts?

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Something I didn't ask that you wanted to share?

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I think the biggest thing for me is just to reiterate that you need to surround yourself with the right people in the right seats.

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That includes your team, the people you work for, because that is going to make all the difference in your life, your work, your career, but especially your marketing.

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For those out there that are marketers and listening to this and that's the number one message I can leave with you- Amazing.

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Thank you very much for being with us today, sharing these stories and your advice and your insights.

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Appreciate it.

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I'm going to link to your LinkedIn and your website in the show notes so people can easily get in touch if they want to learn more about the things you shared or Tranual.

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Thanks for being with us today.

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We really appreciate it.

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Thanks for having me.