Experts Are All Around You

Welcome in everyone to another exciting episode of UGC for b two b, a really fun and educational one on tap here today. My name is Jeffrey Short. I'm a director of platform engagement at Market Scale joined by my friend and colleague, Gordie Tamayo, who is a digital media strategist, works with a number of different clients across a whole gamut of different B2B industries. So really excited to pick your brain here, Gordy. And really the reason we brought you on specifically today is you just worked with a partner of ours on a really powerful video that was, I think two years ago, would have been a PDF. It would have been an infographic. It would have been a blog, but now in twenty twenty five, it's so much wiser to feature your own thought leaders, your own experts that all companies have. And so I was wondering if you could just fill us in off the top here to kind of set the table. You know, what was this video? This is Maestro. They're in the hospitality industry. What was kind of the point of this video? Why did this come together the way that it did? Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jeff. You know, one of the big thoughts was that we're living in a day and age where UGC is super important, but it's also important to find the right stakeholders within your company. And the more that we can find, the better. And so we've been encouraging all of the clients, but this one in particular, we've been having a lot of conversation about finding new stakeholders to involve, tapping into the expertise that they already have. There's a ton of people where they have potential. They have insight. They have things to share. The external audiences and internal ones as well would benefit tremendously if they just had the opportunity to. And so that's kinda where this came about is finding specific experts that have insight with the company. They maybe been operating for a decade, and they've never been tapped for their insight, which is crazy. It's like a reservoir of treasure. And so doing that was basically finding these experts to share some of their expertise in the form of FAQs, you know, and it can be shared with internal audiences, external, but really provides, you know, just content that, audiences can really see the face behind the brand and understand that there's real people, there's tangible people that are actually there to answer their questions and fix their solutions. Absolutely. I think I mean, you brought so many good points there. There's a lot to unpack. A, Those previously untapped experts. Right? I think that's where I've seen. And I'm curious to get your opinion on this in a second, but what I've seen the last kind of year or so that appetite and that willingness for people who otherwise have not had an opportunity, right? The HR departments, the sales team, the IT department, those are true experts. Oftentimes more than the marketing people. Right? They they're the ones that are have boots on the ground every single day with the back end of the company or what they're hearing from prospects. So they are primed to unleash that thought leadership. So that's what I like about this video too, is that it's not the marketing person explaining something. It's actually someone who's facing customers every day, the true mentic expertise. So I really liked that. I am curious to get your opinion on what I just mentioned there, you know, the learning curve, so to speak, you know, you've been with us for a while and just in your own personal life working on content and in the digital media space. Definitely five years ago, the idea of a podcast was kind of crazy to a lot of people where they just said, we'll never have the people to do that. Right? And now, if you don't have a podcast of some kind, it's a little bit odd. Right? So I personally feel like that learning curve is lessening and it's almost more of a risk to not be producing content rather than that feeling of putting yourself out there. You you know, you run the risk of being left behind in and how people learn and make buying decisions now. I'm just kind of curious, you know, you work with a lot of clients, you work with clients in all different industries, hospitality, transportation, agriculture, which have nothing to do with each other, but there's this common through lines. Right? And so I'm curious, you know, what where are you seeing or maybe what advice would you give to people who are apprehensive about exposing some of these thought leaders on their team? Well, the common denominator is that we live in a digital world. And so if there's not a strategy behind tapping into that, then people by default are getting left behind. And so it's a a couple of different ways you can approach it or how I look at it. Sometimes people are prodded by what their competitors are doing, and it's really easy nowadays to point out a competitor that's out there running a podcast. You know? They're doing videos. They got shorts dropping on their YouTube channel. And so that's a quick and easy way to point that out to do that might prod them in that direction. But sometimes it's just pointing to maybe an absent fear that they don't even know exists to hold them back and really helping guide them to see that it's easier than what it seems. And so when it comes to technology and media in general, there's sometimes, quite often, apprehension about it because it seems so elusive. But that's the beauty behind what we're able to do is to guide people through to say, hey. It's really not as complicated as what it seems. We're the experts here to help you facilitate that, and here's how you do it. Here's the tools to do it. It's literally pushing a button and sharing what you know. And so I think once we can help people overcome some of their hurdles and get a win under the belt, then they're more likely to listen to you the next go around and be more likely to trust you for when you're saying, hey, we should probably now consider a podcast. See how easy it was to put that sixty second clip together and build it wins on top of it. One area as it relates to this video, and again, yeah, I might be repeating myself a little bit here, but to any anyone watching this who's thinking about unleashing their team, the idea of those non marketing people who have that experience, that's what I think could be such a valued such a, an untapped resource really for a lot of companies. So I definitely if that's one takeaway from this conversation, I think that would be maybe the biggest is that don't narrow yourself to just your marketing team, but also tied to that, I guess two things. Don't limit yourself to just your marketing team to create the content, but also don't limit yourself when we talk about content creation, I'm sure a lot of people are coming into this call thinking of it through a marketing lens, but those FAQs, I think you might have mentioned this at the top of the conversation or maybe we are talking offline, but that FAQ series could be internal only. It could be for your own employees. What's stopping your HR team from creating some sort of newsletter internally that's maybe more fun to digest than a long, you know, email letter or or your SharePoint site, I guess, you know, five thousand page essays on it. Right? There could be an internal thing. There could be, you know, sales or end user training. Right? Could you add a QR code to your product that prompts a video from that product expert or designer who has instructions or tips or whatever it might be. Right? So don't limit yourself to thinking that content is only for marketing purposes. It's for your own team too. And and one way I would recommend people get started as well is think of episodic content. What can I do that's very repeatable? Like this FAQ series, you can, can you could do an FAQ series, I'm sure every week, you know, with all the questions people get. So that way you don't have to go into the office on Monday, you know, rubbing your temples thinking, what am I going to do this week from a content perspective? If you can create a series, a podcast, a thirty second tip of the week, that takes off that load where you can have focus on the vision and it kind of takes care of itself. But anything else on your end as it relates to the particular video we brought you on to kind of break down? Was there any maybe any, you know, as we watch this video, anything that sticks out to you as why it was successful, you know, I personally just liked that the way the way they filmed it, it was authentic. It was natural. It didn't feel overly scripted. You know, you pop the question on, then you have the expert answer. Is there anything, any other advice you might give, whether it's lighting, equipment, the way they present on camera, anything that you think can help people kinda get started on this? Well, one thing that comes to mind when you mentioned episodic content is that, you know, we've been able to get several under the belt now since the first one launched. And the first one might have been a little bit of rougher sounded, maybe a little bit more scripted, etcetera. But what I see that they did is that it empowered them to say, oh, we can have this person not do it. We can have the next person do it. And so you now got more people that are jumping on the back wagon, so to speak, and being willing to create this kind of content so you build momentum and just getting a win under your belt. So one of the other things that that comes to mind along those lines that I think is a super underutilized resource, and that's the OpenLink option within MarketScale. I think that's a phenomenal way to tap into unknown talent and unknown resources that you got that you could then circle back to and find people for future content. I mean, we've had clients use them over at trade shows where they've sent it out via QR code to five hundred people. More recently, we got one that's gonna be going out for a farewell for an executive that's retiring. And by doing that, unknowingly, maybe they're tapping into some resources that they're gonna be using for some of this content. And so I would highly suggest, you know, brainstorming again about how to utilize those types of tools to tap into the crowd. Yeah. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. Well, I shouldn't really say low hanging fruit. Low stakes opportunities that people can use as icebreakers. Right? You know, one thing we do now with our new partners is we will do what we call, like, a community table video. And it's just to get them going. And it's go to your favorite restaurant or film some sort of team outing. Right? It's not and it's not gonna go on LinkedIn. It's not mission critical to their business. Right? But it's you know, you're probably doing that in your personal life anyway. You're going out to that, you know, Valentine's day. I don't know when this episode will be, released, but we're we're right here in early February. Probably gonna take a photo of that, chocolate cake at the restaurant. Right? You're taking a photo, you're taking a video anyway, or you're going home and, you know, you might be scrolling through Instagram or YouTube shorts, as you mentioned. And what are you seeing there? You're seeing, you know, that cooking video or that product review, whatever it is. So, doing something like that, like a retirement video or a birthday video that, yeah, it doesn't see the light of day on LinkedIn. There's no pressure on it really, is a good way for our marketers out there watching this to get some people to have that awareness of, okay, I, I am comfortable doing this. This is actually pretty easy. Now I see how I could do this to answer that client question or, you know, tech support, whatever it is, product installation videos. I know I can do this now. So I like your point there. Yeah. The first episode might be, you know, ideally your first episode is your most rough episode. Right? And then, you know, we'll help you improve it. But, go ahead, Gordy. I know you're getting there. The other thing that came to mind was that it's it's somewhat of a struggle up front at the beginning to get people bought into this concept of creating content. I look at it as the there hasn't been a culture established to understand that the world we live in is asking for it. Your clients are looking for it. Your employees are wanting to see it, engage with it. It's just not something that's been fostered. And so when you can begin to do some of the, you know, lower hanging fruit, as mentioned before, ways of constructing content, people begin to get accustomed to seeing that, oh, okay. This is the type of media that are not only other people are creating, but our company is also adopting too. And so it's okay. It's okay to tap into it. It's okay to do it. And then the more you do that, it becomes just more natural for them to see an internal communication that comes in via video. It becomes normal for a request to come out for frontline employees to be able to give their opinion and speak to their clients. And so I think that the sooner people, sooner companies can adopt it, the rest will follow, and you're gonna benefit because of that. The ROI is definitely gonna pay off. I love it. I think we can kind of close down here. You know, I I liked a lot of the takeaways that hopefully we're leaving people with the idea of you you almost have permission now in twenty twenty five to be more authentic. Right? That is where the market is and continues to go. So our advice is, you know, you're taking more of a risk by not tapping into that. We've gone over a couple of strategies to get more people involved with maybe a low stakes video or not being narrow minded in that video is only for marketing. It is certainly not. And I think really again, to, to tie it back to the, the video we started with this Maestro FAQ video. Another takeaway for our audience here is that was a great example of twenty twenty five thinking. We understand your blogs are not dead. PDFs are not dead. You should still be doing those, but can we make this video companion to go alongside it? Maybe it's a little more catchy. I mean, the data shows it is a little more catchy on a social media, for example, post that video, then drive people to the blog for maybe even more information or the PDF for more information. So that might be just a line of thinking that or it is a line of thinking. I would definitely encourage everyone watching this video as you go about your marketing goals or your education goals this year. If you're already doing blogs or already doing PDFs, can you create a sister piece of content with a short video that brings more shine to it. So I thought this example was a really good example of that. And, Gordy, I'll give you the final words here if there's any other, you know, tidbits, bits of advice you want to leave our viewers with. Maybe just a final comment, inspirational comment. You guys are all creative. You guys are the experts. You have something great inside of you to tap into and share with the world. Make sure you don't leave it on the table and don't hesitate to share the ideas when they're there. Don't be afraid to propose something that's outside of the norm and uncomfortable. There's something good on the end of it. Love it. Well, I appreciate the, encouragement there. I'm sure our audience will. Great job on, you know, steering our client to a successful outcome in this case. And, really just appreciate your insight because you yeah. You see a lot and a lot of different clients, so your expertise is valuable here. So thanks, Gordy, for jumping on and, looking forward to what else you do with your partners this year. Yeah. Thanks, Patrick. Alrighty. And thank you all for watching and listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of UGC for b two b.