Stop buying boosts like a lazy marketer

Haydn Woods-Williams 0:09

Welcome to the Markers of the Universe podcast. I'm Hayden Woods Williams, digital marketing team lead here at Brew Digital. What we're talking about today is a question that I'm hearing across multiple B2B marketing clients right now. And that is, is social media still a marketing channel or has it become a battlefield for who has the most cash? Now, organic reach is pretty much on the floor at the moment. The platforms that used to reward good content now reward those who pay the most. And the real conversations that are happening in your industry are probably moving away from social media into private places like Slack or WhatsApp and places your brands will never see. So what does that leave B2B marketers with in 2026? So do we pay those rental fees and accept that you know social media has changed? Or is there a smarter way to build an audience that you actually own? Now, to help me work through all of that, I've got Debbie Gakutan Jardim de Oliveira with me, our senior social media marketing manager here at Blue Digital, and someone with years of experience managing social for big names in tech and education. She also has loads of strong opinions, which to be honest is exactly why I invited her. But Debbie, let's get into it.

Audience Research And Smart Testing

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira 2:18

Good question. Well, before I answer this, I want to say a big shout out and hello to our audience. It's been so long since I've been in this podcast, and I'm very thankful and excited that you have invited me again. Um, I do have strong opinions, Hayden. So we're gonna get to it. But to answer your question, um, when I approach brands, I'm approaching them with the notion that they've done the basic research and they have at least like know their audience and whatever existing social channels they're in or thinking of, that's based on research. Now, I would call this the smart guesswork. But nowadays, like social media is so complex, um, it's not as linear as before. So we need to be always testing and always thinking about, okay, where which platform do I want to be in? But also added to the other question of like, what behavior or user intent do am I looking for from my audience? So with that in mind, then you can ask yourself like, is this a channel where in my audience you would usually feel entertained and just want to relax? Or is this a channel where in there in buyer mode and looking to solve their problems, looking for their next partner and so on? I think like these guiding questions are for my, you know, for my clients and I to just like figure out ourselves. And based on that, we can like start testing and start learning from, you know, based on like content of the month that we're putting out and like the results from that and so on. Just to like share an interesting fact. Like a single individual nowadays, you know, we they jump from like six and a half platforms every month. That's a lot. Like I myself am on different platforms every month, but I have a very different persona for each one. So you need to think about your audience the same way. You don't want to basically replicate the same content from your Facebook to your uh LinkedIn to you know your Instagram, if you ever have them. Nice. It's it's interesting what you say about research there, because I mean, ultimately, when you look at a strategy level, it's the the thing that is almost always forgotten about when it comes to marketers, particularly marketers who are in a rush. Um, if you are one of those marketers who maybe hasn't done their research, do you think you should just kind of carry on in the as usual, or do you think they need to take a step back and actually go and do that research? I I think it's if you are a marketer that hasn't done your research for your audience about your audience, can you actually be called a marketer? I don't think so, right? I feel like that's such a basic thing. It's like breathing. And like if you also say, like, I've done the research once, also a big mistake. We need to keep on doing research and and like and testing and researching and like also cross-checking if our assumptions and our research are correct, right? Yeah, yeah, completely, completely. And you know, I guess when it comes to that research, if you know who your audience are, I can you just ask them which social channels they use when they're at work? Yeah, for sure. And I think like um it would be amazing if we have that connection with our audience. And that actually is a good reason why we also need to start thinking about building communities within our social spaces. Because there's really no better way for you understanding your audience and actually just speaking with them. Um, and then trying to again test that notion and test that um, you know, information from your audience. Yeah, you're you're kind of like, I swear you must have read my questions or something because community comes later. Um, I'm I'm tempted to kind of jump then now, but before we we kind of go there, I really want to kind of just quickly swing back to the kind of main focus point of this conversation, which is really around the pay-to-play model.

When Paid Social Makes Sense

Speaker 6:26

Now, organic reach is probably the worst it's ever been, you know, like in some places it feels like it's almost zero without having to boost something, right? Are we at a point where social media is pretty much just pay-to-play? Or is there a way that we can kind of get around those barriers? Yeah, so this is where I wanted to jump in and say, no, Hayden, it is not only pay-to-play. Well, I mean, in some cases, yes. And I'm gonna begin with that. If you are targeting a very specific audience in a very specific topic, let's say I just want to serve this German content to my German audience and you haven't done that before, yes, you need to put much money behind that because it's a non-existing content that hasn't been there. You haven't triggered any algorithms yet, you don't have any um references yet that will basically tell the algorithm of each platform that you exist and you matter in that conversation. Okay, so that's one um one case that I would say that pay-to-play is the right model and like would be in the sphere of conversation. Now, stepping back, do I have to pay to play to everything to for me to do my organic reach for me for my uh content to reach? No. And that actually is a very important thing to think about for each of the platforms. Because first of all, reach is influenced, reach and impressions are basically influenced by engagements. So actually, what you need to be thinking about first is the how do I get the engagement that I want from this type of content based on the platform that I exist in. And then you also have to think about okay, in this content that I have, what is the type of engagement that matters to me? Like, does it matter to me that I have comments? Does it matter to me that I have shares and saves, and so on? I'm gonna give an example of LinkedIn right now, where in basically um LinkedIn's new algorithm, which is 360 brewer, is really driving people to you know use a lot of like comments, but also not just comments, but also the references and like the dwell time of your content. And I kid you not, I'm I'm now seeing that you know, posts that do not perform as well before are starting to perform more now just because I have much more of my community just like you know, creating a thread um around this type of comment. So this is a good example of like I don't actually have to put money behind a launch as long as I do the you know the necessary work of like making sure that I have the right people commenting on a post, that I have work outside of my ecosystem, that I have heated up the engine by you know uh joining conversations before I posted and so on. So we are not necessarily putting a lot of our time and money on boosting posts, but we are putting a lot of our time on actually thinking about your community side, joining conversations and making it much more like um, I would say, like putting on the right pieces. Um, in a way, I'm actually spending much more time on a single post now than I've ever been before. Nice, nice. I guess that segues uh quite nicely into community. Um, and a recent study by I think Prime Technologies Global basically showed that B2B tech buyers are basically 80% of the way through their evaluation journey before they make first contact with sales, right? So a lot of that recommendation is happening in dark social or um WhatsApp, Slack, whatever that might be. If those kind of real high-value community conversations are happening in private Slacks, discourse, WhatsApp, how can you tap into those things without being seen as an intruder?

Engagement Signals And LinkedIn Dwell Time

Speaker 10:36

Yeah, okay, brands, super important. You as a brand do not tap into that. Your advocates do. The moment you send like your staff pretending to be a client specialist, uh, you're losing the battle. This is, and I think like this is something for us to think about very well. Like, you have to, your your audience is in like your brand, you use your brand fans, you build an advocacy program, and your role becomes like the person that equips them with the right helpful content, the training, and all of these things, so that when they have conversations with each buyers, they will be able to give the right information, they would be as useful, and they will do, you know, basically what an advocate does, um, which is very interesting. And I think that I have a stat somewhere flipping through my notes for all of the listeners out there, which is very interesting, which is um advocates actually have 560% more organic reach than a brand page. And you would probably say, oh, like brands and advocates and like these things, we all see that for like B2C and like consumer goods and so on. Not necessarily. You know, I'm gonna give you guys a good example. Um, one of our clients, Script Runner, has a very, very strong community, so much so that when we go to conferences, um, for instance, the Lat atlas and Team 26, we have to give them a separate booth just because they have so many of their um audiences and their like, you know, uh users coming to them and flocking to them and so on. And they are do a very good way of utilizing them and actually finding the right space of engaging with their audiences. You might think, oh, is it a LinkedIn page group? No, it's actually Reddit. And that's a very interesting thing right now nowadays for like brands to think about. Like, what is a red, what is Reddit's um purpose in your in your um you know, in your ecosystem? And it and should it be a page that we need to start looking into if you have not looked into it? Yeah, I I love Reddit. I love Reddit, it's it's such a an amazing one, even just for a mark to like source of inspiration, two, if you're a brand trying to see what people are talking about, your brand, even that is like a fascinating thing to be able to do just on Reddit. Um interestingly, what you were talking about there, and and this is consumer focused, is the the recent battle between the Burger King and McDonald's CEOs eating burgers and that horrendous thing, right? With that and with using brand advocates, and I've got two parts of this question, so so apologies if uh that's too much and we can break it down if if need be. But the first one is how do you manage the risks of using brand advocates? And the second one is how do you maintain their authenticity? So

Dark Social And Advocate-Led Trust

Speaker 13:43

do they speak in your company's tone of voice or do they speak as themselves? I think like uh more than tone of voice, uh, when you first um select and look for their advocates, you're not looking for the one that I would say is the loudest person in the room. You're looking for somebody that aligns with your values first and actually uses the product authentically. And you might even consider the person who, you know, is very much looking forward to, you know, developing the product with you. Um, I feel like there was a podcast before, and I'm pretty sure Tom can pull this up. We're in, I talked about a company that actually, you know, schedules like monthly uh product reviewals to improve, like um to improve their products through the advocates, like mentioned. But that is on another topic. Um so maintaining that tone of voice, I would say you don't really. You maintain like the value that you both share. You need to make sure that they are saying the right information as well. Um, so I think there's that's where training and those helpful contents come in. But I feel like the moment that you tell your advocates, like, oh, you need to speak this way, you need to be more professional and so on and so forth, you're basically losing an advocate. Because um, what buyers love is that authentic voice. And I think that buyers nowadays as well are smart, they know that there's no product out there that is a hundred percent perfect. So if somebody is telling them that this is gonna change your life, it's not, and they will run away from it. But what they want to know is basically like, okay, this is a product, it's gonna save my um, it's gonna fix my problems. I know it's not perfect. How is the company fixing it? How are the, you know, how are like the brand is like, you know, receptive of this? Uh, are they gonna make updates? And I think like those are the information that buyers actually have conversations with the true advocates, and those are where the B2B brands need to spend with the most. And you have another question which I forgot if I answered it or not. So maybe you asked me again. No, completely. And and that is exactly why I instantly called myself out for asking two questions at once. Um, it's really it was really around how do you mitigate the risk. You know, how do you make sure that Joe Bloggs, your director of operations, doesn't go out and start spouting nonsense

Managing Advocate Risk Without Scripts

Speaker 16:27

as mixed. Oh, oh yeah, a hundred percent. Well, it depends on how big is your community advocate group is. Um, there are tools out there that allows you to track these things. Um, in my experience, it's a lot of like somebody says something that is not related to my brand. I feel like this is something that you need to accept that they have their own opinions about something else, and this is a risk that you're willing to take. I also feel like you need to be um, it depends on each company, right? If you are a very risk-averse company, then this is something for you to think about more. If you are very if you have a consumer that is very general, if your if your product is something like a toothpaste or some sort, like would you really care about like varying opinions? Of course, like you have a much more bigger like um consumer group. So I don't I don't want fascist toothpaste. I know, yeah, but it's like it's a that's a very interesting one because it's like it's a balance between empowering your advocate, but like selecting an advocate. It's a lot of like if you see an advocate see say something that is not on ground with you, I think you have to act fast, you have to catch it fast. Yeah, that makes sense. Kind of you know, we're talking about putting a lot of trust into people that you, as a marketing manager or a social media manager, kind of don't have full control over. We're almost like making these advocates community managers by proxy, aren't we? Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly. And I think um they are, and it and it's an interesting one because they are community managers, but then how do you also reward them? And what is the reward right reward function, what motivates them, and so on, and what demotivates them? And that's actually like the interesting balance um that one has to figure out. And to be honest with you, brands out there, there is there are some best practices to follow, but you need you will only be able to know once you start having advocates, and then you again test and learn with them, grow with them and listen from them. You know, I think like that's also a very big part of this. You know, some of like our advocates from adaptivist are very open to adopting, I would say, adaptivist tone of voice, which is very professional, speaks to thought leaders, not too um, not too in their face. But we have advocates that, oh my God, the moment that you ask them to like, oh, can you please like say it this way, they'll be like, no, like my artist does not respond to it this way. And if they have very strong opinions to that, I feel like, okay, let's go with it and let's see how it works out. So I think be open to like working with your advocates. Um, I think that I would hope that nowadays, if you do select an advocate that has the right values with you, you wouldn't select somebody that is like racist in the first place. Because nobody wants that. Nobody wants that in their ecosystem. No, no negative energy here. So I think like that's already a qualifier for you. Definitely, definitely. I think uh yeah, that selection process is, you know, I guess is going to be the thing that mitigates the risk. If if you're solid about that, then you hopefully, unless someone has a complete change of personality, uh, are going to be able to avoid that kind of thing. Um kind of looking at this from a um looping back to that kind of initial question, you know, global social media advertising spend last year hit $277 billion, which is a mind-blowing amount of money, like absolutely mind-blowing. How do you feel? And I'm gonna finish on community in a minute, um, so don't worry about community. We'll we'll kind of cover that. How do you feel that B2B businesses can stand out when so much money is being fed into ads?

Standing Out With Organic Authenticity

Speaker 20:55

Oh wow, okay. Is this part of the question? I feel like I didn't remember this dashboard. Oh, yeah, then that's because you're not supposed to you're like I I'm putting you on the spot, right? You had Tom's questions, and then you had Hayden's secret source questions. The question is basically how can B2B organic compete with ad spend completely, but in a in a way that, like, you know, we've spoken a bit about community. How do you stand out against like a sea of ads with organic content? Okay, good. So standing out can be defined in different ways. And I think what organic does well is that level of authenticity that I don't think an ad spend will be able to compete with. You cannot have a comment of back and forth and threads of like people that actually matter and people that you want to like engage with on an ad spend. And I think that's where I feel a buyer looks into and be like, okay, these are real people and these are real consumers, and these are like insightful comments and useful things that I'll have a look at. And maybe I'll like research this brand more, or maybe I'll engage with their sales team more. And I think that's something that I feel we can make an impact on. And then I say we, organic social media, can make an impact on. It's like that level of authenticity that we cannot cannot achieve from like a very pretty ad campaign. Nice, nice. And I think there's a lesson there for anyone who is who's running paid activity as well is if you can do all of that with your paid ads, then like organic social's got no chance, right?

Paid And Organic Working Together

Speaker 22:34

Well, is it a competition between paid and organic? I feel like it's not a competition. We should be friends. What I think like I would love to see more are like the organic and paid team working well, working better. It's like I feel like we are at a surface, only at the surface level. We haven't seen through it. And there's a lot of opportunities out there. And I'd love to see us like, you know, you know, working well together. Um, this is a shout-out to my paid team. And I think I have a bunch, um, you know, a team that's basically there and ready to like give me the best audience um segmentation that they have if I do need to boost something, or we have conversations of like, oh, this worked well in organic and I have this design. Is this something that you'd like to test on paids? Well, yes, we will. Um, so I think like these are conversations that we are having at the moment, but what else can we do? I think that's that's massive. Um, and you're you're so right. Like, you know, organic and paid, like they're both two channels, but ultimately if your strategy's in the right place, they should be both pulling in the same direction. Um and I think you're completely right as well, with um yeah, with working close, those teams working closer together. And you know, we're really lucky at Brew that you guys are like best friends, right? Um wrapping starting to wrap things up, sorry.

Build Communities Without Buying Tools

Speaker 23:57

Um if a client came to you today and I'm moving us back to communities now, and they wanted to build a B2B community, um, and I read an interesting stat recently that kind of is making me ask this question. Um I I read somewhere, and I can't remember for the life of me where it was, that like 70% of brand-led communities fail within the first year because it's basically just forced promotional noise, nothing valuable, a crap sandwich, basically. Um, what's one tactic you would tell a brand thinking about starting a community to avoid? Yeah. Um other than what I just said, which I guess is the obvious answer. Other than what? Other than what I just said, which is like promotion. Exactly. Damn, I cannot use that one already. No, I would actually say that when you want to start a community, do not be tempted to buy a tool immediately. I feel brands tend to think like, great, I want to be in a community, I want to have a community, I want to manage advocates, I can find a hundred of them. Let me put them on a tool already, let me buy this tool and so on. It's like, you know, I it it's it might work for you, and if it didn't work for you, good for you. But I would say it's always a good thing to always go where they are. So if your advocates are a big user of Slack, can we use Slack to basically like engage with them and talk to them and see what kind of like um model or management system or you know engagement system are they looking for? I think like that's a very good thing to do. And it's again starting small, not and then trying to understand better before you scale. Nice, nice. I like that a lot. Um, and just to wrap things up, with everything we've spoken about today, um, and thank you for all the information you've you've thrown at us. What are your three key takeaways? Hmm, okay.

Three Takeaways And Closing Stats

Speaker 26:08

So I would say that we we talked about the tone of voice. There's a big temptation out there to stand out by being unhinged, by being funny, by being like woke. Um, do not attempt to do it unless it is true to your brand. I feel like not everybody can be dominoes or curious, not everyone can be like taco well and make fun of you know the met gala. And if it's not true to your brand, don't do it. I feel like your audience sometimes influences your tone of voice. So do something that would, you know, your audience would respond to. Second takeaway is um do not give up on organic reach. Um, what's actually an interesting statistic is that organic reach is very down on LinkedIn, but actually it's um 36% up for like video per video views um for thought leadership. So engagement is there, but the question is is like how do you find that audience again? And you don't be afraid to experiment with your content and like test again this algorithm changes that have come out and see what works for your audience. And the final one, because we talked about paid, um, is again like do not like it's very tempting to boost everything in order for you to do organic reach, but it's also I would say the lazy thing. I would say there is um a reward to actually building that community and building comments because in those comments you will actually find insightful things that could actually be helpful for your team and be helpful for the development of your product or service. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, I think you're you've made a really impactful point there about being um customer focused rather than focusing on advertising as a first priority. Um, I'm gonna wrap things up just with a stat that I think supports everything that you say and supports the the fact that social media is still very much alive and kicking. Um, so Search Lab recently uh released some some research around demand gen that showed that 71% of B2B buyers look at case studies during their purchase process and a whopping 84% use social media specifically as a source of information rather than just entertainment. So social media is 100% or sorry, 84% alive and kicking. That is all we have time for today. Uh, a massive, massive thank you to Debbie for joining me and for saying things as they are. I always love that about talking to you, Debbie. Um, if you've taken even one little thing from today's conversation that makes you think differently about where your social budget's going, then we've done a good job. Uh go and do something with it. If you've enjoyed the show, the best thing you can do for us is to go and recommend it to a person you think would get something out of it. Um it genuinely does make a massive difference. Make sure you are subscribed wherever you listen to your podcasts, and go and check out our back catalogue if today was your first time. Uh, there's plenty more wicked content like this. Uh, and thank you as always to the Brew Digital team for all their research and thinking that go into making these episodes happen. I've been Hayden, and these guys are Marketers the Universe.