Andy Lambert, Senior Product Marketing Manager, at Adobe and founder of ContentCal, a social media marketing tool acquired by Adobe in 2021, shares his insights into the intricacies of navigating acquisitions and shares his thoughts on effective go-to-market strategies. He offers some great ideas on how to leverage social media in the B2B space, along with tactical advice on successful campaigns and practical tips to support your own marketing efforts.
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About Adobe
Adobe is a global leader in digital media and digital marketing solutions with a range of creative apps and services for photography, design, video and more.
About Andy Lambert
Andy is a marketing leader who has spent the last 12 years setting up, scaling and selling multiple software businesses.
In 2016, Andy joined two others as part of the founding team of ContentCal, a social media marketing tool. Over five years, the team raised over $10 million, expanded to serve thousands of customers across more than 100 countries, won numerous awards, and, in late 2021, was acquired by Adobe Inc.
Time Stamps
[00:42.2] – Andy discusses his career from founding ContentCal to joining Adobe.
[03:52.2] – Andy talks about the importance of defining a target audience.
[10:59:1] – Andy explains his take on go-to-market strategies.
[15:39.5] – How can B2B businesses leverage social media?
[20:22.3] – Andy talks about some examples of successful marketing campaigns.
[24:48.7] – Andy discusses how the role of the CMO may change in coming years.
[27:31.3] – Andy shares the best piece of marketing advice he’s heard.
[28:16.9] – Andy offers advice for those just starting their marketing careers.
Quotes
“It’s easy to get over enamoured with how quickly you can get stuff done with AI. AI tools are an amazing opportunity to increase your utility and increase your leverage, but it’s very important that we balance that… balance it with a deep understanding at an emotional level of what truly drives an audience.”– Andy Lambert, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe.
“I just need to post more on LinkedIn, right? No. 80 percent of the content that happens about our brand on social should not be from us, it should be from other people. So, it’s our job to try and find a way to unlock that.” – Andy Lambert, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe.
Follow Andy:
Andy Lambert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyrlambert/
Adobe website: https://www.adobe.com/
Adobe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adobe/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Andy Lambert at Adobe
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Andy Lambert
Mike: Andy, thanks for listening to marketing B to B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today, welcome to marketing B to B technology, the podcast from Napier today, I’m joined by Andy Lambert, who’s a Senior Manager product at Adobe. Welcome to the podcast, Andy,
Andy: Hey Mike, good to be here.
Mike: So Andy, I know that you’ve had an interesting career and actually ended up at Adobe through an acquisition. So can you just walk us through you know what you’ve done and what took you ultimately to join Adobe, yeah,
Andy: I’ll keep it short. So my career started in sales, which I fell into by chance also fell into by chance that it was a B to B tech company. And in doing that, found that had a affinity for it, got really into B to B startups and SaaS and all that good stuff. And I thought, like any arrogant salesperson, would you like? How hard could it be to do it for myself? So here I am winning business for another business, fancy doing it for myself. So didn’t have either the guts or the financial backing to do it back then. So I found someone who had an idea. Fortunately, we were introduced, and this idea was for the company that would become content Cal, which, as the name suggests, it is a content calendar product, so essentially allows people to organize their content and publish it. So we met in 2016 won the first customer towards the end of that year, and built it over the course of the following five or so years where we got it to maybe about 100 countries, three and a half 1000 customers, something like that. And in December 21 we sold to Adobe, which frankly, made us all fall off our chairs, if we’re honest, from like a little company, from reading and London selling to one of the biggest companies on the planet, it’s pretty cool. And the vision for for Adobe was that they were really pushing, or they are really pushing, on this product called Adobe Express, which to empower creativity for all. So Adobe obviously known for the Pro Tools in design, Premier Pro Photoshop, yada yada. So Adobe Express is a tool that allows anyone to be creative, even numbers like myself. And the idea here was to connect the design tools that exist in Adobe Express, typically, it’s used for social media content creation, and connect that with a distribution platform, naturally would take a bit longer to for them to have built it themselves. So decided to to buy in the expertise, which is why I’ve now ended up as a senior manager of product Adobe.
Mike: That’s fascinating. I mean, it’s great to hear about that acquisition. I’m just interested. Was that something you were looking for to sell the business, or was it something where Adobe came to you and asked about purchasing?
Andy: Yes. So given our backing, we had been funded since day one. So raise some angel rounds and raise series A so probably raised about ten million all told. And when you’ve gone on that journey, you’ve pretty much you’ve only got one outcome, which is you’re going to have to exit it at some point. So yeah, hands are kind of tied on that one. And of course, those investors all want their money back and then some so, so on that basis, you’re really going for a large exit. Now, did we think we would sell as soon as we did? Because we just raised Series A, and we were on the on the path to hit those gross numbers, go to Series B and just just continue. So that happened earlier than we expected, and we were approached, and after a careful review of it, it seemed like the right strategic move for the business stakeholders, etc. So that’s what happened.
Mike: That sounds exciting. I mean, presumably, you know, with your work, you’ve been focused on really selling to people who do marketing with their professional marketers, or people who’ve got it as a side job, particularly around getting content for social I mean, how do you look at that audience? You know, what do you think these people need? Is it one audience, or is it quite diverse?
Andy: I think initially, we made the very typical mistake of thinking our product was applicable for everyone, and certainly in the early days of building a business, I’m sure many people who’ve built marketing strategies would think the same or feel the same anyway, where you think, Okay, we’ve got broad applicability. Let’s just go out to everyone. Make the messages fairly generic, so we could appeal to the solopreneur or the, you know, the enterprise, naturally, if you’re trying to appeal to everyone, typically appeal to no one. So that was about six months of waste of trying to figure out who we were trying to sell to. So the way we thought about it was through a process that I still live by today. It’s called the customer discovery process. Process from my favorite book on startups, called the startup owners manual. It’s a very weighty tome, and this customer discovery process kind of flips the early sales process on its head, where you just spend more time sitting with lots of different customer segments and just trying to understand from it’s more like a research project rather than like a sales mission, if you will. And that helped us understand that actually, you know, the audience that got us first was those, those smaller agencies and those freelancers that have a bunch of different clients, because they they felt the most pain in terms of content planning, collaborating with clients backwards and forwards on approvals. And that’s where we had that initial traction. So we called that our minimum viable audience. This wasn’t what we’re going to build the whole, you know, multi million dollar vision on, but it was the thing that gave us that sustainable growth to start with. And because you’ve targeted such a focused audience, it means word of mouth spreads much quicker. So that gave us that nice foundation of growth, and as time went on, we started to add different segments, like going more into like B to B marketers. Does that make any sense?
Mike: No, that sounds really sensible. You know, I love that concept of minimum viable audience. I think that that’s a great thing for companies that are growing or just starting out to think about you don’t have to hit everybody. Hit the people who are going to be you know the best audience. You talked about this customer discovery process. Could you just explain a little bit more about exactly what you did there to work out what was your ideal audience or your minimum viable audience?
Andy: Yeah, of course. So the first step was, and it’s fairly simple, to be honest, it spent a lot of LinkedIn outreach whereby I would approach a certain subset of individuals like we’ve just spoken about, and said, I’d love to take you out for coffee, because you’re very experienced in your space. We’re trying to work on something that I think can make an impact to you, but I would love your take on it. And at that point, I’ve not mentioned a product and not mentioned I’d like to sell to like to sell to you. It’s just to find some time, particularly in person as well. Probably makes it sound a bit old school, but like they’re nothing beats being in person for those early conversations. So then, when I sat with someone, buy my coffee, have a couple of slides of like. Our thesis of like, this is what we think is the challenge in the space, the challenge that you’re facing, does that resonate with you? So it’s kind of like validating our marketing proposition at the same time, and then, you know, talk me through what your challenges are, what you wish you could be able to do or achieve, to help you scale or hit your ambitions the other so those very open questions yielded such incredibly rich qualitative data that we could then go, okay, these people started to really resonate when we said these things. And they all connected about like, the pain of sending a spreadsheet or doing WhatsApp approvals, you know, backwards and forwards on content, people started to nod along. It was then, when we’re like, all of those insights, then just inform all of our go to market strategy, all of our messaging, because essentially all we’re doing is repeating back what people have told us. So it’s just, it’s a research mission, and yeah, it’s always my, my thing is that marketers don’t spend anywhere near enough time as they should, directly with customers, and that’s where all the gold is.
Mike: I love that process. I think that’s something we all could do, not necessarily as a startup, but, you know, wherever we are in our businesses. So I’m interested. You know, you started off you, you know, initially looking at these freelancers, small agencies, as you mentioned, you then grew it. I mean, what was the change that happened when he moved to Adobe? I mean, was that like a massive complete reset, or do you feel you’re still doing somewhat the same things,
Andy: Complete reset, if, if we’re honest, so which comes with positives and negatives. Essentially, the product, content, Cal is is no more. So as part of the acquisition, it’s shut down the business. We’re three years post acquisition, so the business shut down, and we focused all of our efforts. A lot of the team, unfortunately had to go. So because snapcha is a lot of duplication of resource, etc, and we’ve built the functionality from scratch inside of Adobe Express. So it is completely like a complete change that, being said, Adobe, being an amazing acquire, has been very respectful, because there is a lot of upheaval, right? So, you know, whilst it feels like a wonderful achievement to sell a business, I’m still obviously very proud. It’s still, there’s still some very painful moments and times post sale, as you can imagine, right? You’ve built a business together, you feel like a family in a startup or so, you know what it’s like working in a small business, right? Mike, so you know that that’s kind of painful, and it unfortunately, it’s just the process it is. It is what it is. So who we’re targeting right now is different. So we’re targeting much more, smaller businesses that don’t necessarily operate. Like agencies, not quite big businesses yet. And essentially we’re kind of starting again, if you will, building smaller functionalities that allow like the solopreneurs to do what they need to or individuals. And then we’re going to go back on that journey to scale it again, because essentially we’ve built the product from scratch, and it takes time to develop the product. And what you can’t do as a business to say, Oh, well, we haven’t got the features yet, or wait till we get the features and then we can grow it. It’s like, given our feature set we have now, who can we appeal best to right now? Where’s that overlapping? Ben, and that’s where kind of the solo printer audience come into it.
Mike: Absolutely. I would just want to move on now to something perhaps less specific about content count and a bit more general. I mean, I’m interested because, you know, if you look at your LinkedIn profile, you talk a lot about go to market. And I have to say I’m a little bit of a cynic. I’m a bit of an old guy. I kind of feel that go to market is sort of marketing, as we used to call it, many years ago. I mean, what’s your view? How do you define go to market?
Andy: When you sent this question over, Mike, I chuckled at this one, because I was like, fundamentally, you’re right, and us in marketing, where certainly me and others are guilty of giving different names to the same thing. And I think that’s often baked in the fact that many people don’t understand what marketing actually means. Marketing is kind of a nebulous concept. Many people conflate marketing with promotion. People think, oh, marketing is like doing the tactical bit, and that’s why I’ve typically called it go to market. So when I think about go to market, which you’re right, that’s, let’s just clarify that I’m aligned with you, Mike, it is just marketing, but just for anyone listening when I when I say go to market and contextually, I’m interested to know if, if if you would still call this marketing when I explained it, think about it in three ways. So firstly, this all the market research or the diagnosis, right? All of the analysis, customer discovery, the stuff we’ve spoken about right at the top, right? So understanding who we’re going after. Then the second stage, which is a strategy, and that’s understanding, or at least thinking about the story we’re going to tell, value proposition, commit, competitive differentiation, reasons to believe all of that go to market strategy, as I would call it. And then the third part is the tactical piece. It’s like, how then do we instill that go to market strategy? Do we which does include promotion, clearly, like Google ads, LinkedIn, etc, includes like offline stuff, events or podcasts like this. But also, and this is an important point, and we might talk about this later in the evolving role of a CMO, is that it also factors in the sales decks, right the scripts the sales people use, the battle cards they’ll use, also how Customer Success deal with customers, how they work towards upsells and even offboarding process. When people churn, you know, marketing, go to market touched on all of that. If there is any single interaction with a customer, it’s in the go to market strategy, or maybe Mike you call it just marketing. How’s that sound to you? Does that that resonate?
Mike: I totally agree. And I have to be honest. I mean, I do see a difference in the way people today approach this problem. So back in the day, you know, when I started out marketing, it was about the five Ps, which pretty much cover what you said in go to marketing, you know, price, position, place, people, promotion, isn’t it. But the way it was done was you looked at each of those separately. And I think what perhaps go to market has done is it’s made it more into a process. People have thought about it, more about a sequence of activities that then impinge on all these things. It impinges on the channels you choose. It impinges on your pricing strategy, your promotion, etc. But I do, I do understand that people today talking about go to market. They’re a lot more sophisticated than people talking, you know, maybe 30 years ago about marketing generally. So I do see it as a positive. And I think that’s interesting. I mean, do you see it as being, you know, much more of this process you run through, rather than this kind of list of five things you’ve got to tick off.
Andy: Yeah, it is. It’s a continually iterative process. And I think this is, and I can only speak from my limited slice of the world that I’ve seen in my 38 years, right? So I’ve only got limited context, but like my strong hypothesis off the back of this is that all of this needs to to tree up to one individual that owns it, Chief Revenue Officer, CMO, whatever role you you want to put in there. Because often we see that kind of bifurcation, where you’ve got CMO or and a Chief Sales Officer or sales director, where they’re kind of little bit at odds, and there’s no one true owner of like that narrative messaging and that whole process, because it is an iterative process. You’re like, like I said in customer discovery, it’s not like we found our Minimal Viable audience. We’re gonna have to do the whole darn process again to go for the next segment. So you’re absolutely right. This is not a box check exercise. It’s not like a like how business plans used to be. You create this. 30 page business plan, which then lives, yeah, in your top draw somewhere, and you never look at it again, right? So it’s it needs to have someone looking at it all the time, and an overall owner of it. So yes, it’s a short version. And my answer to your question, Mike,
Mike: Brilliant, it’s good. We’re agreeing. And let’s move on to talking a little bit about tactics. And if people you know look at your LinkedIn or Google, they’ll find you’ve got a sub stack all about B to B social media. So I’m really interested to know how you see B to B, or how you see social media fitting into B to B, and what you see the pros and cons of trying to do B to B promotion through social
Andy: I’m with you. So yeah, a couple of caveats on that one to call out the word of like, promotion that you just used like, it’s, there’s a be a promotional element to it, but like, predominantly, it’s, it’s not and, and secondly, it’s, it’s important to know, whilst I’m a huge advocate from my context and experience of social for B to B, it’s, it’s the only context I know. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s applicable to everyone, so just want to caveat that from the outset. But the thing is, I personally and strongly believe it’s the way that modern brands certainly B to B’s will grow. Because, like we said, in that kind of customer discovery process, it’s that when you know who your audiences are, and you know the language that they speak, that means that word of mouth spreads. Word of mouth spreads through online communities. And when I say social media, I don’t just mean, oh, we’re posting something to our LinkedIn company pages. It’s, I mean, I know, you know that, Mike, but just to be just for the purpose of clarity, it’s everything that touches social which is the sentiment that’s happening on Reddit threads, for example, in Facebook groups, it’s all of the communities that are that have your B to B marketers, in which, in our case, or whatever industry that you’re in, there will be microcosms of communities online everywhere, and it’s our job to have a voice in those or if at least we can’t have A voice work with others that can have a voice for us, which then goes into the whole influence of partnerships and partnerships with communities, which was a huge Libra that we pulled on at content Cal, I spent as much time with customers as I did with communities that had access to the types of audiences that we want, and the value exchange there requires a delicacy of touch that’s often hard to explain, because it’s not just about, oh yeah, here’s a couple of grand. Can you post something for us? Most those communities, if they’re worth their salt, will say, No. Who are you? You’re joking like, if you spend the time to build a relationship with them like you would a customer and go, Okay, so your community is amazing. You’ve built an incredible thing here. But is there anything that that I can do to help and typically, with those communities like that’s interesting. So that, for example, for some communities, I would co create content like, my strong suit is like social media analytics. So I’d create them content to help their audience with how to analyze and define success on social media. I’d also give their community like 90 day free trials on the on the product, so it actually adds value to those communities. And we didn’t pay them anything. It’s just a value exchange so that they could get something that was good for their community, which in turn makes their community feel better too. So I spent a lot of time doing that. We also had some paid for influencer partnerships. But it’s, it’s all of those voices that started talking about us is a thing that became successful, and this is, and I’m sorry I’m on the soapbox here, so I’ll keep it short, but honestly, that’s, the biggest mindset shift and misunderstanding I see in B to B social. Because people are like, Oh, cool. I just need to post more on LinkedIn, right? It’s like, no. 80% of the content that happened about our brand on social should not be from us. It should be from other people. So it’s our job to try and find a way to unlock that of which is what I wrote my whole book on, to be honest. So yeah, an area I feel very passionate about, as you can probably tell
Mike: Absolutely, and I find it interesting. I mean, I think, like most things with B to B, it feels like social media for B to B is actually quite a bit more complex than social media for consumer I mean, do you agree with that?
Andy: I think it is. It requires a lot more nuance, I would say, yeah, and certainly, as it pertains to the influencer piece, harder to find, harder to work with, because, you know, we’re not looking for celebrities to endorse our lipstick, right? We’re we’re looking for people that are have true domain expertise, that don’t have, like, 10s of millions of followers, because there are cyber security experts, so they’re not going to but we want to find people that have a deep connection with those CIOs in this example that we really want to reach. So yeah, that’s why, yes, in that instance, it takes longer, and you’ve got to be a lot smarter about how you approach it. Definitely.
Mike: I mean, I do think, you know, sometimes people assume that it’s easy. You just contact an influencer and it all works, and it is more complex. I mean, I’m interested. We can steal, perhaps, some of your good ideas here. You know, is there a particular campaign you’ve run that you think was either innovative or particularly effective, that you know, perhaps has some lessons for some of the people listening to the podcast.
Andy: So I’ll do, I’ll do two. I’ll do one from content Cal days and one from A, B to B, tech company that I have huge respect for. One from content Calc. We not spoken about it so far. One of the most successful things that we did, and we leveraged this all the time, it was the cornerstone of our content strategy, was a simple, humble webinar. The most powerful thing, right? So webinars as a tactic won’t be groundbreaking for anyone listening to this, but the thing that we did, that I think, was interesting, is that we paid very close attention to the people who we got on the podcast. So what we didn’t do, even though we’re appealing, you know, right, right at the outset, we’re appealing to those kind of small agencies, etc. Our webinars was all about, how do we have a halo effect for our brand, for who we want to acquire in the future? So that way we invited like the head of social from Monzo or innocent drinks, those kind of brands are hugely respected. No, they weren’t customers. But the wonderful thing that happens when you invite great brands in is that people make a mental Association, which are not prompted by us to say, Oh, wow. Like it’s content color used by Monzo innocent drinks, Steven Bartlett, wow. They must be good. Weren’t used by any of them. But the point is we, we gave a platform for these social media managers to share their strategies, and then we became like the social media strategy people. We just hammered that as a tactic. So on a bad day, our webinars would have 1000 people turn up, and that was our whole funnel based on so that’s that one thing that has worked, not groundbreaking, just when we truly understand the audience and who we’re trying to serve and where we want to take the business, and just curating appropriately, that’s a tactic. And secondly, cognism, one of my favorite B to B Tech brands. They leverage the thought leader ads on LinkedIn, which are a fairly new thing, and basically they they’ve led into the personality led growth approach we all know like how important that is in B to B and yeah, they’re essentially, they’re promoting the content of their individual thought leaders, like their CMO or their chief sales officer, etc, and using that as their main content, because they know and you can see the results on their on their page, that’s the content that drives the majority of the engagement.
Mike: Yeah, and I guess going back to that first point, we should probably say that Napier isn’t the agency for Adobe. We’re not working with Adobe. We don’t actually work in your sector, but if you want to imagine we’re that good, we’re very happy that positive conversation. I really appreciate your time. Andy, I mean it, you know, I want to get to some of the questions we ask towards the end, where we try and ask the same questions to people, just to get different points of view on certain topics. And so kind of a bit of a quick fire round. You know, there’s been a lot of talk recently, particularly in B to B, about people spending a lot more time researching online, a lot less time engaging with salespeople. You’ve obviously seen the light and move from sales into marketing, into a more broader product management role. I mean, do you agree that’s happening, and what do you think marketers should do to actually take advantage of this and make their roles bigger?
Andy: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think there’s a lot of data that empirically proves this too. My single suggestion for this, my own personal perspective, is that as marketers, we need to empower the rest of our sales teams to become personalities in their own right online. So again, that personality led growth thing that I lean into quite a lot, and I’ve seen that just final point on that is that I’ve seen that play off very well from from me personally. So whenever I went into a sales meeting at content Cal, I’m now still at Adobe, people like, oh, I reckon I follow you, or I read, read your book, or I saw your sub stack, immediately the guard comes down in the conversation, you have suddenly that one to one conversation. So I think that that really will will help educate people earlier on in the funnel, and also when it comes to that decision making process. And if anyone you know sales people are still going to be relevant for some B to B’s, and it really helps make those sales conversations work out a lot more positively.
Mike: That’s fantastic. And I think we can lead on to the next question now is so you know, obviously you’ve kind of hinted that the role of marketing is is going to involve really building up the sales team and their brand and their reputation. But what other changes do you think are going to happen? You know, particularly to senior marketing executives. I mean, how’s the CMO role going to change? For example?
Andy: Yeah, I think the the modern CMO, yes, like I said earlier, will need to assume responsibility for more than just marketing, right? We’ve seen the 10 years of. As CMOS, which are at their all time lowest, because typically, I think even CEOs don’t understand this, because marketers are brought in as like chief promotion officers quite often, where they’re like, oh, look, you didn’t move the numbers in a year and a half. Yeah, goodbye. It takes, it takes more time than that. So I think marketers and CMOS, even though they’re senior individuals, really need to start staking their claim as to, like, what’s the macro impact of marketing and organizational level? What are we trying to do? So, for example, like being able to understand metrics like unaided awareness or share a voice, those elements take it away from especially B to be like lead and opportunities and sales and that kind of stuff, because the most important factor of all of this is that 95% of any given market is not in the market to buy. You’ll know this anyway. So marketing needs to elevate the conversation a much more strategic level. That also means that marketers need at the CMO level to be the true experts of a customer. Really represent a customer. Voice know it better than anyone. You should not have a CEO understanding a customer better than you. Everyone should bow down to your knowledge, your deep knowledge of your customer, which will be engendered from those conversations that I spoke about earlier and as well, we’ve got so many AI driven tools as well to speed up market research, get our sentiment all across Reddit and Facebook groups aggregated into a to a nice dashboard. All of those tools exist, and I think that that modern cmo that’s both data informed by all of this sentiment that’s happening, and this is even conversations happening at the top of Adobe too, related to this kind of stuff as well. So we know, we know it’s incredibly important those that can speak with expertise about the customer and use all of that data, but also bring that, that humanity to the business that we absolutely need. Because we know, fundamentally, despite all of this wonderful data and data driven decision making, fundamentally business is human, and it’s a trust based business, so we need to, CMOs still need to be an expert in that kind of humanity and emotional led element of that too. So quite a hard balance to strike. But yeah, that’s the future.
Mike: Sounds like the future could be quite challenging, but also quite rewarding. So I think that’s super positive. I feel bad, you know, almost asking the next question. You’ve given us so much advice, so many insights, but is there a piece of market advice, really good piece of market advice we haven’t covered, that you’d like to share?
Andy: Yeah, it’s probably sounds trite, because I talk about it all the time, but it’s the thing that I would have printed on a t shirt if I could, or if I was sad enough, it would be your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. So that is not my quote, or no one said this to me because I’m not friends with Jeff Bezos, but I just I adore it. It speaks to all of the the kind of fluffy, emotional side of of brand. And a brand is just the feelings and the feelings you engender from the promises that you make. And that’s it.
Mike: Love it. That’s a great quote. And finally, I know you’re you know you’ve been very generous of your time, but if there’s a young person listening who’s just starting out on their marketing career, what advice would you give them?
Andy: Second question, I would say it’s easy to get over enamored with how quickly you can get stuff done with AI. AI tools are an amazing opportunity to increase your utility and increase your leverage, but it’s very important, though, that we balance that, and I’ve said this already, balance it with the humanity and balance it with a deep understanding at an emotional level of what truly drives an audience, and when you combine the kind of the rational and the emotional, that’s when you can truly do great work in marketing. So just, just don’t get over fixated on all of the shiny tools, because the only thing that matters, nothing else matters other than the person you’re trying to serve.
Mike: That’s great advice. We nearly got through a whole podcast discussion without mentioning AI, but even managed to come in. Andy, thank you so much. It’s been fascinating. It’s been, you know, really interesting talking to you. I know there’s a lot you do online, but what’s the best way if people want to learn a bit more or find out about your views on B to B social, how can I either get hold of you or find out more?
Andy: Yeah, so thanks for the opportunity. Firstly, I’m on LinkedIn. Just search. Andy Lambert, you will also see my book, which is probably behind me somewhere. I don’t know if this is going to be on video, but yeah, it’s called Social 3.0 and I have a sub stack, which you can join for free. Just search social three dot sub stack.com, and, yeah, all of my ramblings are in those three areas.
Mike: That’s awesome. Andy, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest on marketing, B to B technology.
Andy: Thank you for having me, Mike. Appreciate it. Bye.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing, B to B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierbe to be.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn. You.
