Ensure Content Integrity in B2B Marketing

Ryan Brock: You're describing the B2B version of the Matthew McConaughey Lincoln commercial. " When I drive my Lincoln, I like to think about the horizon." And so what does that have to do with cars? We don't know.

Elisha Gada: No.

Ryan Brock: Have fun.

Elisha Gada: Exactly, yeah.

Intro/Outro: Welcome to Page One Or Bust, your ultimate guide to getting on page one of search engines. Generative AI is shaking things up in the world of content marketing, and brands of all sizes are pivoting strategies to keep up. That's why we're talking to Elisha Gada, small business marketing manager at Meta. She's a total pro when it comes to rolling with the changes, with more than a decade under her belt at Meta, Dell Technologies and global ad agencies. In this episode, Elisha talks about past B2B marketing makeovers that have nailed their strategy pivots and the lessons we can learn from the new age of content marketing. You'll hear advice for keeping content integrity, maintaining diverse and inclusive content and much more. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Page One Or Bust is brought to you by DemandJump. Get insights, drive outcomes with DemandJump. Get started creating content that ranks for free at demandjump. com today. And now, here are your co- hosts, Drew Detzler and Ryan Brock.

Drew Detzler: Welcome back to Page One Or Bust. This is your host, Drew Detzler. As always, I'm joined by my co- host, Ryan Brock. Ryan, how are you doing?

Ryan Brock: Yo, doing well. How are you today?

Drew Detzler: Fantastic, fantastic. I'm excited because today we have Elisha Gada, the small business marketing manager at Meta. Elisha, welcome to the show.

Elisha Gada: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

Drew Detzler: We're looking forward to it. Elisha, before we get into a couple of the topics today, why don't you share a little bit about your career journey and tell us how you ended up in your current role?

Elisha Gada: Sure, yeah. I started my career in advertising. It was a long time ago, actually, and it's a funny story how I even ended up in advertising. I knew I wanted to do something in the media space and I wasn't sure what. So when I was in college, I did at least I think 10 or 12 internships in-

Ryan Brock: 12 internships?

Elisha Gada: Yeah. At least that many. And I was a radio host. I was also an assistant director on a Bollywood film.

Ryan Brock: Same. Me too. Don't worry about it. Not weird at all.

Elisha Gada: And so I would end up doing these random gigs to figure out what I really wanted to do, and that was actually write. And I ended up in an internship as a copywriter, absolutely loved it. And then I did not look back. So I started my career as a copywriter in the CPG space. I did ads for Oreo, Nivea, all these fun CPG brands. And this was back in Mumbai, so this was back in India, I grew up in India. And the most interesting part was that these brands were global names, big names, but then they were just entering the Indian market. So people knew about these brands, but they were officially in the Indian market for the first time. So it was really fun working on those campaigns. And so I moved from one agency to another. I started at DRAFT FCB ULKA then I worked a little bit at Saatchi& Saatchi, and then I went to Publicis. And then, during those three or four years, I learned a lot about how to run a successful campaign and what a good creative looks like, and how to get your copy approved and how to work with customers and how to work with clients and things like that, all of that. And I really enjoyed thinking about brand strategy, marketing strategy, really thinking about the bigger picture. And so that's what got me thinking about my next step in the career and I decided to pursue a career in marketing. And so I didn't have a business degree. My undergrad was in advertising. It was a purely creative degree. And I decided to pursue a degree in business. So that's what got me to the US, actually. And I studied at the University of Michigan, I did my MBA, and I thought I would probably end up doing a role in marketing in the CPG space. But at Michigan I was introduced to B2B marketing. So Dell was recruiting on campus, Microsoft was recruiting, all these big companies were recruiting. And the culture at these companies was something that I fell in love with. I really enjoyed the opportunity that lied ahead, because I feel like with CPG, there was a hundred years of brand legacy and colors have to be a certain way. Everything was so decided and so had to meet a certain structure that I felt like with B2B, there was just so much more opportunity, especially in tech B2B. And so I thought it was just a better use of my time and I would learn a lot more. And so I joined Dell, so I did an internship in global comms on the global comms team. I worked on influencer marketing, actually, right before it was a thing. And then I joined the B2B laptops and desktops business at Dell. I was running the North America campaigns for six years. So I did a lot of different roles. I started with doing content programs, and then I was running their biggest marketing campaign, and then I was also running campaign strategy. So I did a lot of roles in those six and a half years. And then I focused primarily on the top 3, 000 customers, like our commercial customers, the large businesses as inaudible to address them. So I worked on that and then I was like, " Okay, I've done this, I've done CPG. But one of the things that's missing is a small business experience." It's a completely different world.

Ryan Brock: Totally.

Elisha Gada: Yeah. And so this opportunity at Meta came up and I was like, " Okay, let's try." I got the role and I was like, " This is going to be a great addition, building out the skill sets that I'm looking to build out." And so that's what I've been doing for a year and a half is focusing on small business marketing. It's also a global role, which is a very different experience than working only in North America. That has its own challenges. And that's what got me here.

Ryan Brock: That's what I love about marketing, that especially if you lump advertising in as part of the broader marketing umbrella, you can do anything. You can go anywhere. You can become an expert in a million different things. You can experiment with a million different skills and always have something new to discover. It's cool to hear that story.

Elisha Gada: Yeah, completely agree. I feel like you become experts in so many different... When I started my career, I had no idea about cars, and then I used to work on a car brand in India. And then I knew so much about four wheel drives and how a certain chassis has to be a certain way and things that I never thought I would know. So yeah, they're random pieces of information that I have, which make no sense.

Ryan Brock: There were five or six years there when I owned my content agency where I would argue that in terms of copywriting, content writing, I was one of the most prolific and probably well- established ghost writers on the 401k and retirement space in the country. And I didn't have a 401k. I was telling everybody all day, " Here's why you got to get a 401k, here's why you got to match it out." And I'm sitting there looking at my bank account like, " Crap."

Drew Detzler: I'm still astonished by all of the random knowledge, seemingly random knowledge, in our content writing team's heads. I love it. So you're at Meta now. Let's backtrack a little bit to your pre- Meta days. I'm really interested in your experience there. And talk about brands' marketing philosophy. Let's talk a little bit about how B2B marketing philosophy has evolved over the past decade.

Elisha Gada: Yeah, I can probably, I think, speak to it from my POV. But when I started at B2B, it has to be done a certain way. It was very information heavy, very much facts- forward and very little emotion. And so when I joined the B2B space, that was one of my biggest fears, was I don't know how to market that way. Because coming from CPG, it was all about emotions and moments and about making a customer feel a certain way. And so I started seeing this evolution as well as I was pushing it on my end, in my capacity, in my role that I was doing at Dell, was that it's a customer at the end of the day, it's a human at the end of the day that you're talking to. And how do you bring in that element of B2C and B2B, and how do you tell a story? And every brand has a story. And I also was at that point going through so much research on how B2B decisions are made. And everything is not really a fact- based decision. Obviously, it makes a big part of... Like if somebody's buying 1, 000 computers, it has to make sense financially for them to do that. But it wasn't just that, it was also so many other factors that were playing a role in them deciding that. And I felt like from a marketing point of view, we could also market to all of those things versus just the bottom line, versus just giving them information on specs and versus just talking about that. And I feel like that shift is happening. I hope it is happening across the board. I've definitely seen it happen with the bigger brands where it's more about that story, more about building a brand even in the B2B space. And it's not just about overloading information, it's not just about overloading with technical or cost saving and focusing just on the specs of things. And I feel like that's the shift that I'm seeing and I hope that continues.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, I've noticed in my own experience with B2B brands, I guess even now, you could call them early adopters who are doing the, " Hey, let's try to have a story. Let's try to be human beings and actually do what we're best at, which is telling stories." But then even where that's not happening, what I've been interested in is seeing so many B2B brands embracing that publisher model, understanding that in order to do business in 2023, you've got to be a publishing house. You've got to understand what your market wants and you've got to produce content that guides them on their own journeys of self- education about your things. It's not just talking about what you think is the best value prop in an ad, but understanding the very circuitous nature of the modern customer journey. People are going to learn about things in different ways. You got to be present where they are. And that, in some small way, I think, has pushed a lot of B2B brands past what you're talking about that, that really simple high level value prop persona, blah, blah, blah, technical information stuff. And more into let's just answer real people's questions. And some of them are going to be customers, some of them aren't. But in the end, we're building authority, and that's an important thing.

Elisha Gada: And I also think that when I say the emotion part of it, I feel like sometimes B2B brands kind of take it in the wrong way. I mean, we have all seen these ads where there are random images and words and just inaudible and try to evoke emotion, and then it doesn't make a point. A full range of documentary- style, try to evoke emotion, and then on the other side, it's specs, and let's push our product and let's just talk about how a product makes the difference in the world, and there's no in- between. But as you said, yeah, there needs to be some form of information given to them in the way they want to. That's also thinking about the customer, putting the customer first and giving them information that they want.

Ryan Brock: You're describing the B2B version of the Matthew McConaughey Lincoln commercial. " When I drive my Lincoln, I like to think about the horizon." And so what does that have to do with cars? We don't know. Have fun.

Elisha Gada: Exactly, yeah. And as a copywriter, I've written a lot of those car commercials myself.

Ryan Brock: We all have. It's so easy to be exploitative emotionally or to pretend we're smarter than we are, and then you think you're missing out by not just saying you get it. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Elisha Gada: Yeah. So I'm equally to be blamed here, but I do feel like, I think there's a very happy, nice medium that could be achieved.

Ryan Brock: We're going to get an email from Elisha's people after this saying, " You know, Elisha wrote that Matthew McConaughey commercial." We need to research, dude.

Drew Detzler: Please cut that out prior to posting. I love that.

Elisha Gada: Hey, I wish. I always wish working with him. So, yeah.

Drew Detzler: That was a perfect example, though. So Ryan, I know you've had this conversation, and Elisha, I'm sure you have, but do you have any examples or stories of some of those early adopters of the, " Hey, let's not just put out dry specs and technical stuff"? Someone that said, " Yeah, go ahead, put some personality into it." Because one, how did you get them to agree to that when no one else was agreeing to have that personality in their content? And two, how did it go?

Elisha Gada: Yeah. I can speak about stuff that I worked on. Two things, actually. So I worked in the influencer space at Dell, and it was not even called that, I think it was called influencer marketing much later. But when I was working at Dell, we realized that influencers were a big part of obviously a narrative, a social narrative. But also when we are selling laptops for big companies, it's being used by end users and the end users are the ones that are consuming all of this content online. And so we really were diving deep into our brand equity, where does it stand and who are the people at the end of the day advocating for what laptops to be used? And we realized that our regular media plans were really not targeted towards them. And so it's also very difficult to make the case when we won't see a direct ROI uptake when we target to consumers in a B2B brand. It's kind of unheard of. But I think we just saw this kind of shift. Especially with COVID, people were just consuming so much content online. Daily view times were going up significantly on social media. And so that was one of the opportunities that we tapped into. We presented the data around, " See, that's how much time people are spending online." There's also this whole slew of corporate influencers that have come up. They were basically talking about work from home and making a lot of humor around that. And I was like, " That is amazing. Let's tap into this. Why do we have to sound like a boring B2B brand? We can be fun and part of the social narrative." And it doesn't mean compromising on what our brand stands for, really just presenting our brand in what the current scenario is. And so that's what we made the case for. Luckily, I think, with the leadership, we had to talk about just the followership. And it wasn't a big budget that we set aside. We set aside a small testing budget and we were like, " Let's start with three influencers. This is how much budget we can probably set aside for testing and let's see how it goes." And obviously, there was a little bit of data that was backing it up. But then it was just purely also an intuition and a logic game at the end of the day, really making the case. And we started small and we saw an amazing engagement with those pieces of content and they were really pieces of content that you would want to share. And it is not just something that a brand is being pushed forward. It's so organic, so well put together. And so when leadership saw that and then they just saw overall a change in the sentiment, it was obviously very small because it was a smaller test, but they were able to see that happen. I feel like that's where it got the buy- in on influencer marketing. And we had never done that in the B2B space. I don't even know a lot of brands still do that. And so I feel like that was something that was unique about what we did at Dell.

Ryan Brock: For sure. I mean, we do that, right, Drew? I mean, influencer marketing, in a way, is a big part of how we, a B2B SaaS company, market today. And it's because that genuine voice cannot be distilled to, " This is the brand speaking." It's okay to have a human that's fallible be somewhat representational of what you're trying to accomplish. So it works for us.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, it does.

Elisha Gada: Yeah. It also has to be done... You can't give them a script. If you are doing influencer marketing, you have to do it right, and you have to keep it authentic to their voice. And so you have to find this medium of where does your brand meet, and where does their voice meet? And you cannot push. So I think that's also very important, is that some brands try to do it, but then they do it extremely wrong.

Drew Detzler: Yep.

Ryan Brock: Amen.

Drew Detzler: Okay, that brings me to a topic that I know is near and dear to Ryan's heart, and Elisha, yours as well, content integrity. Talking about putting humans into the brand, let's talk about content integrity, especially in this era of automation. So Elisha, what's your take on the current state of B2B marketing in this automation era that we're in?

Elisha Gada: So AI is the word, right? You turn a corner and that's the word you hear, is AI. I feel like everybody thinks that generative AI is the next best thing. Of course it is, it is going to make lives easy. But I don't think people understand fully, including me, I would say at times, is we don't understand fully of the capabilities, what that's going to mean. And then what that's going to mean when hundreds of brands are now going to use generator AI to build their content. So at the end of the day, obviously it's about how good of a prompt you can write, but it's also about your knowledge of what good content is. Because generative AI is now going to make 1, 000 people think that, " Oh, we are copywriters," and now they're going to push out, thinking, " Oh, this is the best- performing blog." And I feel like it's going to be Hunger Games, but it's like AI Hunger Games of whose content is going to rank to the top. But I feel like you have to have a good sense and knowledge of who your customer is, what do they like, what is authentic content, what is something that's going to resonate? And those things will not go away, or those things will not change even if AI is here.

Ryan Brock: I've heard a concept before that we should have a version of the Olympics where everyone is allowed to dope, where you can use as many steroids, as many performance- enhancing drugs as possible. Let everyone do it, and then see what we look like as humanity at our weirdest, at our fullest extent. That is exactly the situation we're in right now, where essentially AI has made doping legal for every brand when it comes to making marketing. And now you have all these brands who think that thing that's gotten them through all this time, which is doping, is going to make them win when everybody's doing it. So now you have to find the other thing that's going to make you better than the next guy. And it's certainly not using the same thing they're using, the exact same way.

Elisha Gada: Exactly. Oh my god. I couldn't have described it better myself.

Drew Detzler: Was it the Tour de France when Lance Armstrong's stuff all got ripped away, that to find the person that didn't test positive for some sort of doping, they would've had given the winning to the 20th person? It's very similar to where we are with AI and content.

Ryan Brock: The funny thing about it is, what that means effectively is you can have your scruples and you should be wanting to do the right thing, you should be wanting to provide value in content. But if your scruples take you to the point where you're like, " Nah, I'm going to ignore that whole thing because I'm better than that," then you're going to be the guy in 20th place waiting for everybody else to get knocked out. There's got to be a middle ground. Unfortunately, it's not illegal to use this stuff, so it's kind of a broken metaphor. But the point is, can't go one way or the other. If you're the only guy not using it, then you have no shot in the world. But if you're using it right, and you're doing it like other people and you know that that one thing isn't the advantage, yeah, maybe it's-

Drew Detzler: So what is that? Elisha, so what is that? When it comes to maintaining your content's integrity while also using AI and other automation, how do you do that?

Elisha Gada: This is my take on it, is that I feel like AI is a good starting point, but it's not the end result. And I think you have to have a brand voice. You have to have people that know your brand voice. You have to know who you're talking to, what are some of the things that resonate with that audience? What are some of the messages that you want to say? What is your key message? What are some of the things that you think ladder up your overall brand message? I feel like those are the key things you always have to keep in mind. And then AI is a good starting point. You feed it in, you see whether, what the output lands. There'll obviously be some kind of fine- tuning that you can do. But nothing can take away the human element of knowing that yes, this is a good piece of content that my customer is going to like. And it has just probably taken away hours of your work, which is a great thing. So you can now push more content, but obviously you don't push a lot of content inaudible.

Ryan Brock: Or you can push better content, or you can do more creative thinking. I'm very much looking forward to the world where I can sit in a room and stare at the wall for five hours just thinking, and that's productivity because now I got the tools to help me execute when I'm ready. We should all be looking forward to that.

Elisha Gada: 100%, yeah. There are probably, at this point you are, as a marketer, prioritizing out of the 20 messages-- not even 20, 10 messages-- you can probably do justice to three or four. And I think with AI, you can probably now spend more time thinking about those, like what are the key strategic messages you want to tell your customer? And then AI does the heavy lifting of building that out. And then you don't do heavy lifting, but you basically fine tune it. And then that, I feel, is something that I see being a use case. But I wouldn't fully ever rely on generative AI to just start building content for me.

Drew Detzler: Agreed. One last touch point on AI before we get to our lightning round, and that's around diversity and representation. I know we've had some discussions about that at DemandJump when it comes to using AI and content. But Elisha, do you think that there's potential for when using AI, it having unintentionally an influence on diversity and inclusion representation of your content?

Elisha Gada: I do think that, I feel like AI definitely is like it's your input that make the output at the end of the day. There are studies from so many different outlets that have come up with AI obviously thinking a certain way, responding a certain way, things like that. So I do think from a diversity and inclusion point of view, I'm curious to see what the output is. But I in general feel like marketers really need to be more cognizant of the marketing that they're putting out and really need to think about how they represent their customers. And this is a learning journey for me so I'm not sitting on a pedestal trying to be preaching about it. But it's just about if you're showing your customers... When I look at marketing, I'm like, " Is this what your true representation of a customer is?" For example, I'm South Asian. And if I see South Asian households, so often they're something really hard for me to relate to because that's not what a South Asian house looks like. That's not how South Asian parents behave. It's a very different dynamic. And all of us come from... especially in America, there's people come from so many culturally rich backgrounds, and I feel like that representation isn't documented well. So I'm really not sure how good AI is going to do a job of even... It's not like we don't have those inputs for a very strong output. And so I feel like that is something that could definitely give a marketer an edge if they really decide to dive deep, really understand the customer, and then try to showcase that.

Ryan Brock: I agree 100%. And I think it's important to even take a step deeper into the problem and think about what is at stake in this situation. Because, I mean, it's one thing to say intellectually, I think anybody who understands marketing and understands technology can understand why an AI might lean towards predominantly the views of white males like me and Drew, because those are the people that have the loudest voice in American society. Those are the people that have benefited from a pedestal the longest. But what's at stake there? Why is that a problem outside of the fact that we're not just listening to other voices? Well, it's a problem because we all start just homogenizing, and creativity dies, and insight dies. And so when you look at AI and take it at face value that it's answer it gives you on a question that might have multiple answers is the right one, you're ignoring a lot of people who have a lot of insight and a lot of perspective and a lot that can be taken into account as you are trying to provide value and solve a problem. So I'm afraid of AI as it exists right now because of the way that it could make us even more stagnant in just accepting the status quo and accepting that certain people who look certain ways should be the ones deciding what the general consensus opinion is. And then I'm also afraid that it's going to lead to less curiosity, less creativity, and less diversity of perspective, which is so important right now.

Elisha Gada: Yeah, exactly. 100%. And I feel like also the data that we have is over hundreds of years, it has left out so many. It has left out women, it has left out minorities, it has left out so many different people and their point of views, that if we start relying on this instead of making it better, I feel like the whole narrative is again going to skew one way, and it's just not going to be... Yeah.

Ryan Brock: And if we base all of our AI models on that old data that wasn't complete, then we're locking ourselves in time. We're freezing it, and that's not good.

Elisha Gada: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Ryan Brock: So AI, let's kill it. Kill it dead. You heard it here, folks.

Elisha Gada: Shut down the machine.

Drew Detzler: All right, we will end on that tale of caution. But before we go, Elisha, we're going to walk through what we call our lightning round. I'll just ask you a few questions and you rattle off the first thing that comes to mind. Sound good?

Elisha Gada: Yeah.

Drew Detzler: Elisha, what was the last thing you searched?

Elisha Gada: Shopping list for Alaska.

Drew Detzler: Oh, okay. Alaska.

Ryan Brock: You're going to Alaska?

Drew Detzler: When you going to Alaska?

Elisha Gada: I'm going to Alaska next week.

Drew Detzler: Oh, awesome.

Ryan Brock: And you're now just shopping now?

Elisha Gada: I mean, I'm a last minute person.

Ryan Brock: All right. Yeah.

Drew Detzler: I love it. I'm with you.

Ryan Brock: Where are you going in Alaska?

Elisha Gada: I'm going to Wrangell-St. Elias, and then Kenai Fjords and Homer. So those three places.

Ryan Brock: Wow. I've always wanted to go. It sounds amazing.

Elisha Gada: I'm really excited. Yeah. I'll send you guys pictures.

Drew Detzler: Yes, please do. I'm jealous. All right, Elisha, what's your favorite offline hobby?

Elisha Gada: I don't know if this is a hobby. I love working out. I love lifting weights. I love running. I've discovered it four years ago from not doing anything to now doing this every single day. And then cooking, I love to cook, but also experiment with healthy recipes. I don't eat gluten, all that fun stuff. And so I'm like, what can you make with all these restrictions that you have? So yeah, I would say those are the two things that I really enjoy. And then, oh, this would be a miss is that Seattle, so I have to hike. And that's one of the things I have to say that I like doing. I don't like doing it.

Drew Detzler: Yep. Yep. Well, we were just going to assume that if you didn't say it. I love it. All right, Elisha, are there any books or movies that have made you a better marketer, other than the movie that you worked on in one of your 12 internships, obviously. That clearly did.

Elisha Gada: Yeah, that definitely made me a better marketer because it made me quit. I think Invisible Women. That's something that we were just talking about right now. That's been an eyeopening book recently about how women have been left out in different kind of research studies and how the world is pretty much designed without them in mind. It obviously gets me angry every time I read it, in a good way. But it makes me always think about the biases that I have. And I think sometimes in a certain way, I feel like that is something that has really helped me be a better marketer, really question some of those beliefs.

Ryan Brock: Quote from that book that captures what we were just talking about really well. " The result of this deeply male- dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience, that of half the global population, after all, is seen as, well, niche."

Elisha Gada: Exactly. I found out that door handles were designed keeping men in mind and their hands and our hands are smaller. And I haven't been angry at door handles as much as I have within the last two weeks.

Ryan Brock: Elisha, getting angry at inanimate objects is one of my favorite things. So this is great. I love hearing that from another person.

Drew Detzler: He is very good at it, if you ever need some lessons.

Elisha Gada: We would get along. I get angry at inanimate objects all the time.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, I can tell. For sure.

Drew Detzler: I love it. Okay. We'll finish up with this one, Elisha. Finish this phrase, " Content is king, but..."

Elisha Gada: Clarity is queen. You need to have clarity, I feel like, on what your content is going to say, who it's going to target, all of those fun things that we spoke about. Good content is king, but I feel like it is the clarity that drives it to be good.

Ryan Brock: As a writer, I can tell officially that you are a writer. That is what a writer would say, through and through. A real one, anyway, a good one. So thank you for sharing that wisdom with us.

Drew Detzler: And quick- witted.

Elisha Gada: Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, I really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for having me here.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, thank you, Elisha. This was a great conversation and we'll do it again.

Ryan Brock: Where can people find out more about you?

Elisha Gada: You can find me on LinkedIn, Elisha Gada, and then also on Instagram, Elisha Gada. Everywhere I'm Elisha Gada, but find me on only those two places for now.

Ryan Brock: Show notes, listeners. Find it in the show notes.

Drew Detzler: Of course. Find it in the show notes. Well, thank you, Elisha. Another good one, Ryan. And that's it for this episode of Page One Or Bust.

Ryan Brock: Later.

Intro/Outro: Are you ready to dive even deeper into pillar- based marketing? Here's your chance. The brand new book, Pillar- Based Marketing: A Data- Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works by co- host Ryan Brock and Christopher Day is now available in paperback, hardcover and ebook editions. Find it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or look for the link in the show notes.