Ep. 011: Driving (digital) customer engagement with content

We talk B2B content with Jeff Epstein, career B2B marketer and storyteller, and Vice President Marketing at Tryten Technologies, a company driving innovation in the healthcare industry.

Jeff's 'mantra': 'If your content doesn't generate awareness, inspire action or help the sales team close deals, it isn't worth creating.' In this episode, he shares his best practices on:
- learning what your customers care about
- 3 ways how to create effective content
- measuring the impact of your content along the sales cycle (attribution, CRM)
And we zoom in on the role that social media plays in listening to your audience and getting visibility for your content.

About Jeff:

Jeff's specialties include Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, Analyst Relations, Competitive Intel, Business Development, and Partner Enablement.

His extensive B2B Marketing career extends across industries focusing on tech. He is currently the Vice President of Marketing at Tryten Technologies. This Seattle-based healthcare company leads the revolution in Telehealth and medical device carts with designs, capabilities, and services built for today's evolving healthcare industry.

 A native of Montreal, Jeff lives and works on the other side of Canada in Vancouver.

Follow Jeff on LinkedIn or learn more about Tryten Technologies.

About our sponsor ReadyForSocial:

ReadyForSocial is a leading social selling company and sponsor of this podcast. Since 2014, ReadyForSocial has supported large companies in the DACH region, Europe, and the USA by introducing, managing, and expanding their social selling programs.

Learn more about their solution and services here.

Lisa and Monika both work for ReadyForSocial. Feel free to contact them about this podcast or about ReadyForSocial's services: Lisa Davidson and Monika Ruzicka.

Transcript

Lisa Davidson: 0:02

Hi everyone and welcome back to Let's get Straight to Business, I can tell you that we have a really exciting episode in store for you today, because today, we are talking about driving customer engagement with content focusing on digital. But before we jump into our topic, I want to give you some background information. According to Gartner, as of 2021 83% of all typical B2B purchasing decisions happen before a buyer engages with a provider. The purchasing decision for this statistic includes researching solutions, ranking options, and benchmarking pricing. Now, while this number might be 'old news' to many marketers, it is nevertheless a great starting point for today's episode:'Driving (digital) customer engagement with content'. Are you wondering why? Well, let's say you have three major competitors, your company will get less than 5% of your buyers direct interaction time to convince them of your product or solution. Now, when we're looking at the 83% of the buyers journey, where your clients and prospects are on their own, content is an important way of educating and influencing them. By sharing content on your various digital channels - online, by email or via social media - you may engage your prospect while they're doing their research and start building meaningful relationships. But what content really helps you drive engagement? How do you measure the impact of your content? And what role do social media and social selling play in engaging your customers? We're excited to discuss these and other questions with today's guest speaker Jeff Epstein. Hi, Jeff. We're so happy to have you on today's show.

Jeff Epstein: 1:45

Hi Lisa, hi Monika. It's a real thrill and an honor to be here.

Lisa Davidson: 1:50

Hi, Hi, Jeff. Hi, guys. So before we dive into our specifics, let's first take a look at Jeff's credentials. Jeff Epstein describes himself as a career B2B marketer focused on

one metric: 2:03

driving impact. He believes that content isn't worth creating, if it doesn't generate awareness, inspire action or help the sales team close deals. From sales funnel to case study, from search engine marketing to PR to lead generation. It all comes down to the story you're telling and how it's received. Jeff's specialities include product marketing, sales enablement, analyst relations, competitive intel, business development and partner enablement. His extensive B2B marketing career extends across industries, focusing on tech. He is currently the Vice President of Marketing at Tryten Technologies. This Seattle-based healthcare company leads the revolution in telehealth and medical device carts with designs, capabilities and services built for today's evolving healthcare industry. A native of Montreal, Jeff lives and works on the other side of Canada, in Vancouver. But before we dive into today's topic, Jeff, could you briefly explain what medical device carts are and why they actually matter?

Jeff Epstein: 3:07

Sure thing. So medical device carts are mobility platforms. They are what the hospitals and care centers use to move devices and equipment from room to room, floor to floor, around a hospital or care center safely and securely so they can get to the point of care easily. That's what a medical cart does. Now, there are all kinds of sizes and shapes. Tryten specializes in smaller footprint, lighter weight cards designed for digital-first medical technology. So think of portable ultrasound devices, video conferencing platforms, patient engagement solutions, that's where Triton has carved out a niche in the medical cart space.

Monika Ruzicka: 3:49

So it sounds like it's really a telehealth solution. And it's not just the cart? but you are really building the solutions. How do you do that you work with partners in your industry? Or.... can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Jeff Epstein: 4:05

Yeah, most definitely. So there are two main ways that our products are taken to market. And this is unique for what Tryten does. One of the ways and the most common way is, a hospital or a care center will come to us and they'll say, Hey, Tryten, I have these iPads that my hospitalists and nurses use around the hospital for different purposes. And they're getting lost or they're dropped off a bed or they're walking out the door. Help me, help me [...] keep my iPads secure and make them more user-friendly and mobile so I don't have to lose them. And so we design carts that then our customers can use to mobilize those iPads as an example and use them more efficiently through the healthcare workflow. So a nurse can grab the cart and roll it into a room and set it up for a teleconferencing visit with a remote doctor, or the nurse can roll it to the patient's bedside so the patient can log in and check their test results. Maybe order their next meal, if they're in a longer stay at the hospital, check their health records, and even do video conferencing with their loved ones at home, which during the pandemic, obviously, was a real challenge for both patients, providers and family who weren't allowed to visit the hospitals at all, right? [...] And the other way that we go to market is the technology providers. So the medical device companies, or the video conferencing equipment companies, so companies like Zoom and Poly and Logitech and Jabra, and medical device companies like Echo and Philips, they'll come to us and they'll say, Hey, we're getting demand from our customers or buyers, that they want to put our equipment on a cart, and they don't really fit on these large computers or workstations on wheels that tended to dominate the healthcare space. So we give them a platform that they can then OEM - which means they can, they can sell it through their own channels - we sell it to them, and they sell it down the chain. And so those are the two primary ways that Tryten goes to market.

Monika Ruzicka: 5:58

Okay, interesting environment that you are sitting in there with your company.

Jeff Epstein: 6:04

It is. It's a unique little space, because when you think of the medical cart space historically, and everybody has been to a hospital- and I think, you know, fortunately, or unfortunately, all of us have, for some reason or another - you picture these big huge mobile workstations called computers on wheels or workstations on wheels, and they're heavy, and they're big, and they've got a big footprint. And they're hard to wheel around. They're better than sitting at a desk, but they're just not that friendly to move around. And as medical devices get smaller, as software goes to the cloud, as tablet computing, iPads and Microsoft Surface and Lenovo and Samsung become more prominent tools in the healthcare space, they don't need those big carts anymore. And now they need smaller, lighter, more nimble carts.

Monika Ruzicka: 6:50

Makes sense.

Jeff Epstein: 6:51

I think so.

Lisa Davidson: 6:51

Thank you so much for your explanation, Jeff. So, looking at today's topic, we invited you to give our audience a feel for driving digital customer engagement with content. Could you start by explaining the role of content[...] in the digital B2B marketing world?

Jeff Epstein: 7:09

Sure thing, and this is why I was so excited to to join you on this call today, because this is where my passions really lie. So when you think of content in digital and B2B, the analogy that I like to share with the audience is it's just like real estate. What is the golden rule of real estate? Its location, location, location, right? Well, in a digital space, the golden rule of B2B selling is the same thing, location, location, location, but the definition is a little bit different. And let's get right to the point here, the equivalent of location on a digital space is SEO, search engine optimization, right? It's a noisy world out there, the quicker that you can be found by the person searching for information, whether it's product or service or whatever, the quicker that, let's face it, the quicker Google can [...] bring you up to the top of that surface, then the more likely you are to drive traffic and then drive conversions. So content is the tool that helps you own that location golden rule that SEO golden rule, there's no other way to do it.

Monika Ruzicka: 8:13

Hmm, I like that comparison.

Jeff Epstein: 8:16

Yeah, but before I go too deeply, there are other ways to do it. There's backlinks, and there's domain authority, there's all kinds of things. But there aren't very many companies in the world like Apple, who they can throw all the rules out the window when it comes to website design, and user experience and SEO because everybody knows them, and everybody's gonna go to Apple Store. But 99.9% of other vendors out there who are fighting for brand awareness and share of mind, it's all very technical. It's all about SEO and location.

Lisa Davidson: 8:48

So how do you generate that kind of content that people really see and find?

Jeff Epstein: 8:54

That's a great question. So there are three primary ways of generating effective content. And I'm going to dispense with the easiest way first, and then we'll get to the more exciting, interesting ones. So the easiest way is to look around your competitors and see what they're doing with storytelling and content and just replicate that, right? Or use similar storylines. I'm not talking about plagiarizing or stealing content. I'm talking about observing the topics they talk about, and then showing that same voice and that's easy, that's what I call a very low-hanging fruit. It's very junior. You're not gonna get very far because they've already got a leg up on you, they've got better SEO, they've got better recognition. Google's gonna say, well, those guys came first and they have more traffic to that page, so I'm gonna like that page more than your page, Jeff. So that's fine. The other two ways to generate useful content are one is current affairs. So you want to be dialed in to what your audience is thinking and feeling in the moment. And that could be trends in the industry, so let's take health journey example. Telehealth and telemedicine are all the rage these days because of the pandemic. Telehealth is nothing new. It's been around for over 20 years, believe it or not. However, the pandemic really ushered in a rapid adoption and expansion of telehealth services, simply by necessity because people could not visit a hospital anymore. Doctors were working remotely, they wouldn't come in to see certain patients and family couldn't visit their their family members who were hospitalized during the care center. So telehealth all of a sudden quickly rushed up to the mainstream. So that's a current affair that you need to be dialing into as an example. The other way to generate content is[...] it's a bit of an ugly word, but it's, you got to stalk people, you've got to stalk your customers. And what I mean by that is, you have to follow them, see what they're interested in, see where they're hanging out, figure out what stories get their attention, and then bring leading contents that mirrors that in front of them. So you could sit here, I could sit here all day long in my office at Tryten, and say, Hm, medical cards, you know, what do I want to talk about today? And that's a very one way kind of siloed way of thinking about content. What I really should be asking is, what does my audience care about? What are the pains that they're wrestling with? How can I educate them? How can I make their lives better? And how can I become a trusted adviser and authority to them. And then this is the long play of content. The long play of content is to maintain that share in mind, so when the customer is ready to buy, they're gonna remember Tryten's name, because Tryten helped them, Tryten taught them something. And that's when they're going to pay you back with awarding a contract. So, and that's the whole purpose of content content is not asking for the sale, content is educating and becoming a trusted adviser.

Monika Ruzicka: 11:43

Yeah. So Jeff, one question. How do you, what are your best practices and finding out what your audience actually cares about? So, you know, in a previous episode, we've talked about buyer intent and listening on social media. How do you find out what your audience cares about?

Jeff Epstein: 12:06

So that's a great question. There are lots of software solutions, technologies, like Moz, and Semrush, and tools like that, that you could use to track keywords and see what people are diving into. Nothing, to me, nothing beats the age old quality choice of asking your customers what they're interested in. So you can do that a number of ways. You can have an advisory panel where your customers are, you're meeting with them once a quarter or twice a year, and they're telling you what's on their mind. You can do surveys to your customers, and there's always time to engage. Whether it's through a, when you send them a monthly statement, or they're in a quarterly business review with your sales rep, you know, Hey, like what's what's keeping you up at night these days? And then there's dialing into your sales team, because your sales team, especially in B2B, business sales, like Tryten is in, we're not selling commodity products, the sales team is very dialed in to their customers, their buyers, the different personas they deal with. And they're going to tell you what the customers are wrestling with, whether it's regulation or service levels, or trends in health care, new equipment, they're gonna be a great source of [...] truth from the audience. So I would need to build a very complex and multifaceted listening system of technology, and sales engagement and direct customer engagement. That, to me, has been the best way of making sure the topics that you're thinking of producing are going to resonate with the

Monika Ruzicka: 13:43

Yeah, yeah, thank you.

Jeff Epstein: 13:45

Now, I haven't mentioned social media yet, I haven't mentioned social media. Obviously, social media is a very special when it comes to current affairs, it's the best place to go for what people are thinking and talking about trending hashtags and trending topics. There is risk involved, because it moves super quickly. So you can easily miss something or you can latch onto something that fades or burns out very quickly. But it's really important as an input to hear what are what are your influencers talking about. And influencers is a term that any content writer or creator will recognize and any marketer should recognize. There are leaders in every industry, healthcare, by no means an exception. And there are people[...] in these industries who tend to lead the way with thoughts and perspectives and ideas. And they're the the futurists, the people who are going to be giving you a sense of where the industry is going. So as a marketer, no, I just hired a content and social media specialist and the first thing I had her do was learn who the influencers are in the healthcare space. Follow them get to know their topics, get to know what they're writing about, because what they're writing about is going to be what people are going to be caring about a couple of months down the road.

Monika Ruzicka: 14:56

Yeah, it's interesting. I actually I was I was gonna ask you about the social media. Thanks for bringing that up in your industry, what what are the most important social media channels.

Jeff Epstein: 15:11

So, like most B2B spaces in particular, LinkedIn is far and away the heavy hitter. So, they're the 800 pound gorilla in terms of connecting with influencers, learning what topics are trending, and obviously sharing content as well. So LinkedIn is the number one platform. But, people have other lives and Twitter is a close second. Twitter is faster, and smaller sound bites and news more quickly. It doesn't tend to be quite as effective on the engagement towards sales was LinkedIn is. But what I was getting at was all these people that are active on LinkedIn, as a professional, what they do when they go home at night, and this is a tip of the hat to the demographics that we deal with in the healthcare space, primarily. What they do when they go home, or on their commute home, is they get onto Facebook. And they're sharing stories from their workplace in a more casual way, they're engaging with their friends, obviously, everybody knows what people are doing on Facebook. And so we found, especially among the the nursing and the frontline caregiver population, we've found that Facebook is an important place to listen to see what these people are doing when they're not at work. Yeah, and then Instagram is quickly coming up as another channel. And Instagram has been really popular for sharing pictures and images and videos and stories. And we have to be careful in the healthcare space, because as everybody knows, there's intense privacy rules. And certainly, you know, you're not going to see a nurse or a cardiologist sharing an Instagram picture of how they help a patient. But they're going to be sharing images of new technology they're trying out, or they're going to share stories of genericized kind of made neutral and generic or anonymized stories of what they do day to day. And vendors like Tryten, vendors, like the healthcare medical devices companies solutions, we're getting more active on Instagram as a channel of sharing very easily consumable, what I call snackable stories and images. And it's another way of getting share of mind. You have to do that, you can't not do that.

Lisa Davidson: 17:25

Yeah. Jeff, you mentioned that you notice Facebook being very important and relevant for you and your, your company and your industry. How do you measure the impact of your content? How do you know, one of the social media channels works better than the other?

Jeff Epstein: 17:44

So that's, that's the $64,000 question. Because the one thing I tell my sales colleagues is, if it's not going to help you do your job and open more doors and close more deals, then I'm just not going to publish it. So it, it's all about the results that you've gotten. So how do we measure success and impact here at Tryten? So in a number of ways, for one thing, we're a HubSpot house. So all of our CRM and automation goes to HubSpot, which is wonderful, because all the data is in one place from the entire customer lifecycle of lead acquisition, through the opportunities through the closing and evangelism and beyond. So we can see everything our customers are touching through their lifecycle, as they come in from either a digital ad, or organically or a trade show. And then what data they consume, what content they consume, which one kind of is the last touch before they enter into a deal cycle. So let me roll back and get to your point. So there are what I call vanity metrics. And that should be a term familiar with the audience. A vanity metrics is like impressions, right? So how many eyeballs did you get your posts get? Or how many visitors did you have to your website? Those are good kind of early indicators of whether or not something is you know, has the potential for success. But it's vanity, because it's really hard to tie that to results like sales or pipeline. So vanity is good as a leading indicator, but then you want to see a number of attribution models in place, you want to look at your content in different ways. And you want to attribute its impact to the sales cycle or the customer lifecycle. And here's what I mean by that. We published a blog post and we just did a trade show last week in Boston, the American Telemedicine Association Annual Conference & Expo. And we're going to publish recap at the top three takeaways, in case you didn't make it to ATA yourself, here are the three things that we think you missed. So we publish that post. So we want to see how many people see it. There's the vanity metric. How many people click through to read the blog post. So again, it's a bit of a vanity metric, but now we're getting closer to the lifecycle. And then did anybody from that stage did anybody fill out a form to download a white paper or, even better, fill out a Contact Us form because they have a real project in mind may want to talk to the salesperson. So we'll know from an attribution model that what was the last thing they did before they reached out and filled out that form? Right? So that's one way of measuring impact. Then once the sales cycle starts, once they fill out that form, and they say, Hey, I need 10 carts for this project, and then we'll see, Okay, so the sales rep now owns that cycle will track if they're consuming other content, and that could be LinkedIn posts, it could be blog posts, it could be downloads of a number of kinds, watching video. What was the contents they consumed during that sales cycle? And then what was the last thing they consumed before the deal was closed? Why? Because although [...] we can't say with certainty that that piece of content triggered them to close the deal, it had to have an influence. And if nothing else, it kept them in the game, right? So those are the things that we do at Tryten to measure what content landed the lead, what content moved them through the lifecycle and what content helped them close to win.

Monika Ruzicka: 21:08

Nice, it sounds. It sounds like you got it figured out. I mean, you know, we talk with a lot of people that are struggling with how actually to track all of this. And I really liked the way that that you described it, how you're doing it at Tryten.

Jeff Epstein: 21:26

It really all starts with a well-designed customer relationship management platform, a good CRM system, because otherwise you're talking about loads and loads of manual reporting and data. And it's just nobody has enough time or enough staff to do that. So when you build out a CRM, whether it's Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics or HubSpot, you want it structured in a way that will let you capture that information. We do all of our social posting out of HubSpot as well, because again, it's one choke point for all of our content allows you to broadcast to multiple social channels from one location, to do scheduling and then do the tracking. And if somebody clicks in, and then you could use a form that says, oh, this person came to you from Twitter, this person came to you from LinkedIn. This is the form they clicked on. And then you have that attribution model built in to your customer record and you don't have to do the aggregation and analysis, it's done for you by HubSpot.

Monika Ruzicka: 22:22

So that's, that's actually interesting. I mean, we we've talked in the podcast, we've talked in a previous episode about Microsoft Dynamics and about Salesforce. We haven't talked that much about HubSpot. So you are posting basically to your company channels, you're posting the the postings through HubSpot directly. So you are getting that information as you described it directly back into HubSpot if your customers or prospects are interacting with your content, right? So that's, that's integrated?

Jeff Epstein: 22:56

That's correct. We can do all of our scheduling and create all of our posts in HubSpot on all those channels. Now, it's not required because any good CRM system, Dynamics or Salesforce or even HubSpot, if you don't publish there, will be able to consume, you know, third party data. But for us, because of the size of team, we have an agility that we want to have. We like doing it all from one central location.

Monika Ruzicka: 23:22

Yeah. Now, Jeff, I'm not sure if you are there with your organization. But imagine, so if you are posting content on LinkedIn, like through your profile, or imagine you have like your regional sales people doing that. That's then [...] not something that you could track through HubSpot, right? Because LinkedIn, I mean, when when you have the individual people posting, that's not something that you can track, because that's not integrated, is it?

Jeff Epstein: 23:53

That's correct, you can't track that all you're going to be tracking are your corporate accounts, not the individual accounts. However, the workaround for that, and this is where, you know, this is what companies the bar is, is fairly low, but a lot of people don't know this: When you have a post on LinkedIn, for example. And if you have a call to action, which you not always should, but you often should. The call to action, which is driving to a landing page or a web page with the right UTM, with the right marker on that UTM, you can then consume that in your CRM and say this person came to us from that UTM. And then you've said, Oh, that UTM is from my LinkedIn posts. So then you can do the attribution that way too. And now you won't be able to say, Oh, it was my sales reps post that that person did, because we're all using the same UTM, right? Yeah. But at least you can track the origin.

Monika Ruzicka: 24:46

Yeah, that's that's actually great that you mentioned that. We've worked with UTM codes in the past with with some of our clients. But yeah, I like that you bring that up. Thank you.

Jeff Epstein: 24:59

Well, you know when the CFO or the CEO knocks on your door and says, Prove to me that what you're doing is working. You know, that's the age old challenge with marketing. It was, I forget the gentleman's name, but it was a retailer at a Pittsburgh, Shoemaker, I think, years and years ago, he coined the statement that, I know my advertising budget is working, but I only know which half.

[Note: 25:23

The name of this gentleman is actually John Wanamaker, and the exact quote is, “I know my advertising is working. I just don’t know which half.” (Source:

https: 25:27

//www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2016/09/14/wanamaker-was-wrong-the-vast-majority-of-advertising-is-wasted/?sh=2262d774483b] So that means half of your advertising and marketing is like your blind, right? And that's what CFOs will hold against you all the time. The better you can prove it, the better you can say, This lead came from that trade show, and then they read this white paper, they clicked on this webinar, then they'll understand that the investments you're making are having the desired impact, which is revenue. When I tell my marketing team, like everybody marketers say, Bring me leads bring me leads. No, that's not good enough. Bring me qualified leads that are ready to make a decision, right. I'm not interested. I'm not b2c, I don't need 4 million people visiting my website a day. I'm happy if 10 visit my website, and nine of them fill out a Contact Me form. That makes me super happy.

Monika Ruzicka: 26:15

Yeah, that's a good point that, that we always discuss also, when we implement, let's say, social selling programs, with clients [...] the first thing that you are inclined to look at is how many views how many, you know, how you said it, eyeballs did we get, but you know, then that is not entirely indicative of your success, because you need the relevant engagement. And that might be much smaller. But yeah, that's B2B.

Jeff Epstein: 26:47

Yep. And it's, you know, it's the click rate, which is the number of impressions overall, the audience size that went through this, the click through rate, which is, you know, those that clicked, those that opened an email, for example, how many are actually taking action, and there are benchmarks, it's very easy to benchmark yourself, whatever industry you're in, to know what you should aim for, for those types of metrics. And then the tools that you have to use to improve and surpass. That's where things get super interesting. So as an example, let's talk about social. So your you post on Twitter, and let's, let's assume it's an actual, the culture, it's about a product, and you just launched a new cart. And you really want people to come and check out your new cart, because you think it's well designed. And it's serving a purpose that your competitors haven't quite figured out yet. So it's, it's, it's there's action that you want to take. It's not just customers. So you publish that tweet, and there's a link to a landing page. And on that landing page, you have a section has the details. And that's great. You can easily see what kind of traffic you're getting, what kind of click through rates you're getting. And then you have the people who are like, who actually want to get a demo, I want to see this card in action. I'm going to I'm going to give you my email address and name now I'm going to de anonymize myself. That's a word. And you know, get on your radar. And that's really what the sales team wanted. So they don't really care about how many people saw your ad. They want to know who to get the call and book.

Monika Ruzicka: 28:21

Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Lisa Davidson: 28:29

[Food question] Okay, well, now that we have our food question out of the way, I'd like to focus a little bit more on multichannel customer engagement strategies. Can you explain what role social selling plays? And how do you go about it usually?

Jeff Epstein: 32:52

Sure. So like any modern marketing program, you cannot think in isolation of one marketing channel, you have to think about how you're carrying your story, and [...] how you're engaging with your audience, wherever they are. So web, email, social. I might as well stop there and use those examples. Fortunately, we're getting back into live events, and b2b which is which is super important too. Regardless of the channels that you are engaging you're using, you need to have a very consistent story and consistent theme, right down to the campaign level across all those because people are going to find you and engage with you in different places, different times of their day and night. And the last thing you want is brand confusion, or a call to action confusion. Because that's just going people remember that people are going to remember, you know, I saw this Tryten ad and then I saw another video and it looked like this a different company just didn't know what they do. So that's really dangerous. So multichannel selling and multichannel marketing, the most important thing to do is make sure your story is consistent, make sure your campaign feed is consistent across channels. So that's the number one example. Now, you asked about social selling in particular. The benefit of social selling, I like to think of it as keeping the lights on or keeping the body warm, if you will. So oftentimes, somebody might first touch your campaign on social, but it's a fleeting passing moment by the very nature of social media, right. So if it's Twitter or Facebook, it's a post that they saw and then the next time they refresh or come back 15 minutes later, that post is gone. LinkedIn is a little bit different. It tends to have a bit of a longer staying power in front of the person, but it's pretty fleeting. So social is important because it gives you the air cover you need. It's easy to release, and it's small consumable snackable sound bites or visual bites that your audience can quickly digest, put in their brain and then move on with their day. So you want to use social selling as the lights always on keeping that body warm until the person is ready to take action. Because you're gonna always also be emailing them, you're gonna be using content and SEO to bring them into your website, when they're searching organically, you're gonna have ads that are also going to draw them in, you're gonna meet them at a trade show, and you want to have that social selling angle, always, like I keep saying keeping those lights on. So that's how we approach social selling. It's, it's, it's not the most likely channel for conversion and getting people to take action. But it's that recall, it's maintaining share of mind so that when they're ready to there, they know where to go. Does that make sense?

Monika Ruzicka: 35:33

That makes a lot of sense. I like that, this keeping the lights on. And I wanted to ask you that, because you spend a lot of your time before you joined Tryten in the software, I think industries. How do you see that? Do you see any differences with regards to the role that social media, social selling plays, in the healthcare industry?

Jeff Epstein: 35:59

I don't see a difference in the role it plays, but I definitely see a difference in execution. So software, especially SaaS software, especially b2b SaaS, software as a service, is probably the most sophisticated other than consumer marketing. It's the most sophisticated b2b industry there is. So if you want to, if you're in b2b, and you want to look at best practices for social selling, and basically content strategy or anything, look to the SaaS space, because what they're doing is going to be cutting edge. In contrast, you come into healthcare, especially on the manufacturing side of healthcare[...] yeah, I would say to put it mildly, we're a few years behind the curve. There's a lot that healthcare equipment and service manufacturers and providers are doing that is that have long since faded in the more advanced industries. So I see a lot of my competitors still talking about their product. Hey, I've got this great new feature in this great new, you know, carts or this great new medical device, come check it out. And there's no story attached to it. There's no... why should I care? There's no emotion, it's just, Look at me look at what I've done with this new product, don't you want to buy it now? And that's beginner, like that's old school way of marketing. So, in the in the b2b space and the social selling side in my industry coming from software especially the, the opportunity is, is it's easy for me and my company to bring in better practices and quickly outstrip what my competitors are doing. In fact, at the trade show, I was at two weeks ago, the ATA show, a couple of my competitors came over and said, I've seen you guys everywhere. Where did you come from, and I never even saw you. And now I can't get away from you. And I'm like, That's music to my ears. My competitors are complaining that I'm too noisy, that all of a sudden, you know, I have the share of mind[...] That's exactly what, that's the pain I want to cause them, right?

Monika Ruzicka: 38:01

Yeah. That's a nice little story. Oh, good for you. And I liked also what you said about the storytelling because, and for me, that goes really closely together with social media and the storytelling because I mean, I guess storytelling is helpful in any kind of content and communication, but especially on social media, where people have such a short attention span. And oftentimes, when they are on social media, they are maybe in a state of mind, which they're trying to relax. So they're trying to, you know, switch their mind off and scrolling through their feed, even if they're not, you know, consciously trying to switch their mind off. But sometimes you just scroll through the feed, and you get kind of numb to all these different contents that you see there. But then, if you can catch them with a good story, or even a visual that kind of sparks some emotion or that connects to something deeper than you know that their acute consciousness of what they're trying to do. I think that's such an important thing on social media. I recently listened to a presentation of a woman I don't recall her name, but the company was called Corporate Visions. And she was a neuroscientists. And she talked about how in b2b communication, a lot of b2b communication, especially also on social media, it's just too, too heavy. And she said, There's basically three ways that people make decisions to click on something or to engage with a company in this example. And so one is, as she called it, like reflex-driven and so you reflexively react to something or you have the habitual path, as she called it. It's something that you see that connects with something that you are used to, that triggers like some sort of habit that you might have. And the last one is goal oriented, which, which like is the hardest one and takes the most energy out of people to make a goal oriented action. And most of the time, I think when people are on social media, they are not in this like goal-oriented state of mind unless they are actively researching information. But if you have these little snack bites and snippets that you talked about of information that you can somehow spark people's subconscious interest, I think that's especially on social media is such a helpful thing that that really creates an impact.

Jeff Epstein: 40:41

That is brilliant. I love what you just explained from the neuroscience perspective there, the reflex, the habit, and the goals being the much more like active state of mind deliberate, that is great. Let's unpack that for a little bit, because this is something that keeps me and my team awake at night and you sit there going, how do I get somebody to take action, right? It's really what you're trying to do. Ultimately, not every time. Sometimes you just want to entertain, and sometimes you just want to storytell. So let's unpack that. So for me, when I look at the human psyche, and even in the b2b space, let's not forget that even though I'm selling to IT people or clinicians, they're still humans and they still have human proclivity. So there are, there are three realities that you have to be aware of when you're doing social marketing or social selling. One is the overload, the noise, there's just so much out there, like you said, you're scrolling through dozens of stories in your feed, right. And that's always changing every 60 seconds, it's refreshing. So humans, we're faced with this information overload. The second thing is people are smart, a lot smarter than they used to be. And what I'm getting at here is, you cannot, you cannot risk insulting somebody, or assuming something and not recognizing the fact that, hey, this person is smart, they've done their homework, and know what they're talking about, don't insult their intelligence with your content. They're going to do research, they're going to look around. So acknowledge that you're dealing with some very smart people. And the third one is more anthropological in nature. Humans are social creatures. Humans need social connection, we need people. And I think storytelling is the second oldest profession in the world. I think we all know what the oldest profession is in the world, we're not going to talk about that one. And I think storytelling, you know, sitting around the fire, sitting in the cave, sitting with your tribe mates, recounting stories, every major human culture is based on allegory and stories. And we are wired to understand the world through stories. And that's why storytelling is more important and more powerful than a product feature or an announcement of a new capability. If you can contextualize that in and phrase it as a story. Because but when you do that, just saying, well, here's why it matters. Here's the background of what drove us to do this. And we understand what problems you were facing. And we understand, you know, we think we have a fun way of making life better here, let me tell you a story that's gonna resonate with you. So that's why storytelling works. It's the overload, it's to understand that people are smart, and you're playing to people's natural anthropological tendencies to consume stories.

Monika Ruzicka: 43:32

Yeah, I like that. And kind of to tie it together, everything that we have discussed so far is, so what I heard you say, if we boil it down to the essence is, if you want to be successful with content, now in the b2b space that we are talking about, you have to understand what your audience cares about. And then there is ways of finding that out, as we discussed, and then you have to deliver them the content with the storytelling that resonates with them.

Jeff Epstein: 44:13

That's exactly right. And I think if you do that successfully, you have done two things, you've either earned the right to ask for their business when the time is right. Or you should have confidence that when they're ready with their budget, and their project and their need and their time to do all that fun stuff, they're gonna remember you as the vendor that stood out and didn't rush for the jugular and the hard sell, gave them information needs to be used, entertained and engaged with them in a way that they didn't get elsewhere. And that's gonna stick that's gonna remember now you have to do the rest of it right? You have to have great service with your sales team. You have to deliver on time and have high quality and right price and all that. But you've earned the right to go to that level, if you engage them in the stories that matter to them in respectful, intelligent ways and in channels where they hang out.

Lisa Davidson: 45:05

Thank you so much. And with that, I'd like to round up our fantastic interview with marketing expert Jeff Epstein. Don't forget to connect with him on LinkedIn. I'll include the link to his profile in today's show notes. Thanks again, Jeff, for taking your time and sharing your knowledge with our listeners and us. And thank you at home for listening to the straight to business podcast with your host Lisa Davidson and Monika Ruzicka. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into driving digital customer engagement with content with Jeff Epstein.

Monika Ruzicka: 45:45

Awesome, thank you so much, Jeff, really appreciate it. You gave us some great insights and our listeners about how to use content in the b2b space

Jeff Epstein: 45:54

I hope so. I hope they can walk away with one or two interesting things to do next. That was fun. Thank you very much.

Monika Ruzicka: 46:00

Thank you.