Marketing is really lovely underneath it all. Sometimes you just need a little inspiration.

And this week, we’re bringing you marketing lessons from the Grammy-winning and diamond-certified album holders, No Doubt.

Together, with the help of the Director of Product Marketing at GetResponse, we’re talking about going pop with your content, sharing the good with the bad, and so much more.

About our guest, Abby Hehemann

Abby Hehemann is Director of Product Marketing at GetResponse, a comprehensive email marketing platform that provides small businesses, solopreneurs, coaches, and marketers with powerful and affordable tools to grow their audience, engage with their subscribers, and turn subscribers into paying customers. Prior to joining GetResponse in January of 2023, Abby served as Director of Product Marketing at Coursedog. She also spent nearly 9 years in marketing at GetResponse previously. She specializes in strategic product positioning and value-driven messaging. She has a demonstrated history of high impact GTM, lead gen, activation, and retention campaigns. She’s skilled in Digital Marketing, Customer Education, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Content Marketing. She is a customer-first and product-obsessed – with an MBA from the University of Central Arkansas.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From No Doubt:

• Go pop with your content (Hint: Use AI). No Doubt expanded their audience by transitioning from niche ska music to pop. And they did it without losing what made them unique - namely Gwen as an iconic frontwoman and lyrics based on her lived experience. You can expand your audience too by putting out content on new and unique channels you haven’t accessed before and the trick is using AI. Abby says, “Using an AI tool, we could still use our own content, what we wanted to communicate with our unique voice, but experiment with a new format, like a comic book. This is a way we're trying to figure out how to adapt and evolve with new technologies and be more efficient, but in a way that's still foundational to what we care about and the content is still in our voice and our perspective.”‍
• Share the good with the bad. Talk about your mistakes and shortcomings as well as your strengths and successes. It builds trust, relatability and likeability. It’s like how No Doubt’s album, Tragic Kingdom, was about Gwen’s breakup with her bassist, Tony. It’s not a positive experience, but it became their diamond-certified album because it spoke to listeners. Abby says, “Not that you need to air all of your mistakes, but the idea of like, that is what authenticity is, right? You share the good with the bad. You share the parts of your life where you're vulnerable. And that's like what artists are doing. It's just something that we don't do in B2B marketing.”

*”Most new startups and SaaS orgs emerge solving a very specific problem for a very specific audience, which is excellent. And that makes you special and unique and have a really strong selling point. But then the next thing is on scaling. How do we do this for more people? And then you have such a risk of diluting what makes you special. If you try to expand, it's super risky. It's risky for you to try to do more often with less and still make a big impact.” - Abby Hehemann

*”The one with the most customer insights - the one who knows what customers are feeling, what they're saying, what words they're using - you win. You have clout in a meeting. You have the most legitimacy. You should be driving conversations and doing whatever it takes on your team to figure out how to have access to your customers.” - Abby Hehemann

*”B2B content marketing gets such a bad rap for being a sea of sameness, super boring, not distinctive. Everybody’s talking about driving revenue and getting more leads. And you don't know who's saying it. It doesn't even matter. There's no distinctive tone of voice, point of view, who's talking about what. And I think that definitely points to the need for authenticity. That's what we're craving as humans, even though we're representing companies purchasing software. We're still wanting to make those connections and actually have some element in our brain that recognizes, ‘Oh, this is an actual human being I'm trying to do business with.” - Abby Hehemann

Links

Listen to No Doubt

Connect with Abby on LinkedIn

Learn more about GetResponse

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com.

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK.

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