This week I’m writing live from the balcony of a hotel in Brooklyn, New York. Fresh off the heels of AudiencePlus’s inaugural event, Goldenhour.
It’s safe to say my social battery 🪫 is wrecked in the best way. But my heart and brain are so full.
This week was filled with magic from beginning to end with rooms filled with people we’ve known for years finally uniting in person.
And events at their core are about connection.
I’m walking away having had so many enriching conversations. I got critical feedback from my peers about my business, had face time with LinkedIn friends I’d never met before, and watched a net new event playbook unfold in front of my very eyes.
So, feels right to talk about building an owned media playbook this week. Everyone is talking about the need/wants/desire for B2B brands to become media companies. And at the core of that is creating an owned media audience for your brand. So, let’s get into what that even means, and why everyone’s buzzing about it.
Rented > Owned > Monetized
Alex Lieberman, founder of Morning Brew and storyarb, explained the concept of how we should think about audiences as an upside down pyramid. At the top audiences are rented, then owned, and lastly monetized.
My take on his pyramid is that the goal of each layer should be the fuel the next. (This concept is applicable to creators and to brands so read this with an open mind.) In order to build an audience and gain traction you’ll likely need to create a strategy for leveraging rented channels. The positives are larger reach, higher likelihood of virality, and broader feedback loops. Those who find value in your content on a rented channel are those most likely to convert to owned channels.
The downfall of solely having a rented audience strategy is exactly as the title portrays–you don’t own this feed. You’re at the mercy of the ever-changing algorithms to earn share of voice in the feed. Or an even worse case, the platform is down the same day you’re planning a big launch, then what? 😬
Moving an audience from rented to owned creates a higher propensity for deliverability and a higher likelihood that you’re content is consumed. And I’m sure someone far smarter than me has already conducted some research here around the increase in likelihood of your subscribers to buy, but if you’ve earned enough mindshare that they’ve now subscribed, you’re definitely more likely to earn marketshare, too.
And naturally, once an audience is in your owned media ecosystem, the next natural progression is that they become monetized. This could be that they buy your product (either through PLG or SLG), or they buy a course, additional content, cohort access…the list goes on.
Back to Goldenhour briefly. One of the final sessions of the day had Amanda Goetz on a panel and she said something that helped me solidify this pyramid concept. She mentioned not only should rented fuel owned, and owned fuel monetized, but also that each layer should work inverse, too.
She said, “you should mine for gold in your owned audience to understand what got them to subscribe.” And vice verse that your monetized audience likely holds the keys to helping you understand more about what levers you could pull to help you with your owned to monetized conversion rates.
Where do you even start
Having successfully built an owned media strategy a handful of times for different B2B SaaS brands, and also having failed miserably once, the hardest part is actually just shipping something. Yes, it’s probably going to be bad. You’ll look back on whatever that artifact was and likely find 10 ways it could’ve been better, but you have to start shipping.
So there’s a few ways to start. Arguably the most important part of this engine is that you have to make content, regardless of where you’re distributing it, that deeply resonates with your audience. It either needs to be funny, educational, or both.
Make content that deeply resonates. Start with enabling your existing subject matter experts that you have in house if you’re a brand (SMEs) or hire a creator in residence.
Create content pillars that will resonate best with your audience. Remember: your best content ideas will come from prospects/customer calls, and internal calls. Have a recording software join your internal meetings so you can drop those transcriptions into ChatGPT, prioritize them, and make plans to create content covering them.
Pick your creator advantage. When just starting out, don’t stress about trying to be all things to all people. Say your SME is uncomfortable on camera…no worries. Have them write articles instead. Not great at writing either? That’s alright. Have them sit with you on Zoom for 30 minutes a week, just the two of you, hit record and them transcribe the file into a written first draft.
Edit and publish. There are stats about this. I believe it’s 90% of podcasts that don’t ever make it past episode 3 before they fizzle out. And there’s no telling how many podcasts never make it from conception to launch. So just press go! Go on whatever that first format ends up being.
Create a content waterfall. Figure out what works for your brand here, but the way I’ve seen this work well in the past goes like this: We used to get a CEO into a studio for an hour a week. During that hour we would film a podcast episode that would then be transcribed, cut into microclips for social media, editorialized to written blogs, and sent out in the weekly newsletter. All for an hour a week of SME time.
Create once. Distribute forever. Ross Simmonds just published a book about this - really great read btw.
The industry is moving here
Before you start thinking, “literally no one is doing this.” Think again. Amazingly enough corporate brands are already moving in this direction. A fun fact I learned from the conference: John Deere is hiring it’s first ever, Chief Tractor Officer. 🚜
And B2B is already making moves here, too.
Cognism has in-house experts for their RevOps and Demand Gen personas, and leverages a creator in residence in Morgan Ingram for their Sales personas.
Zuora has Zuora+ – an evolution of Zuora’s more than 15 years of thought leadership and industry expertise, presented to you in a frictionless environment, across multiple media formats.
And actually one of the earliest examples I can remember of a brand trying to do this was Terminus back in 2019ish for a series they called The Roof. Of course the internet eats everything so I can only find this one LinkedIn post about the series, but you get the gist.
Owned media is the future.
See y’all next week!
Kaylee
Awesome recap, Kaylee, this definitely helped paint a picture of why businesses need to take this movement seriously. Also, I hadn’t seen the John Deere promo yet, that was a cool callout!