0:00
Alina Dallal
Hi, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, how to keep your B2B content strategy competitive with marketing intelligence. We love questions, so you can go ahead and drop them in the Q and A and we'll get to them at the end. And don't worry, all of you will receive a copy of the webinar afterwards. We will also have Jamie here from Team Oktopost will be able to answer any of your questions during the webinar in the chat. I am your host today. I'm Aliyah Dalal. I am the content marketing manager here at Oktopost. Today we're talking about how you can build a content marketing strategy that's not just consistent and competitive, but also feels effortless. And how to spot those early signs that hint that your competitors are shifting strategy and how you can act on them. I have two incredible seasoned professionals with me who have been in the industry for decades. They really and truly live and breathe B2B marketing, and I'm so excited to have them join me on this panel. So let's dive in and kick things off with some introductions. Zoom. Zoe, Jen, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and your background? Zoe, I'm going to kick things off with you.
1:01
Zoe Haimovitch
Hi, everyone. Glad to be here. I'm Zoe. I have been B2B marketing professional senior leader for the last 20 plus years. I love B2B marketing. I find it really exciting and I've been in content marketing over 15 and so I'm here to share how I do my work, how I do my strategy, and I love this new tool. Amazing.
1:30
Alina Dallal
And Jen?
1:31
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. Hi, everyone. My name is Jennifer Gutman. I am the director of Customer marketing here at Oktopost. I have a decade of experience in B2B marketing and even more so, a decade of experience at Oktopost. I was the fifth employee to join the team and I am obsessed with B2B social. I truly believe it's the anchor to any successful strategy. And a huge element of being successful is understanding what your competitors are up to. Right. To not only stay ahead, but to keep your strategy fresh. So I'm really excited to dive into today's discussion and I'm really honored to be alongside Alina and Zoe, who I like to call my B2B marketing colleagues to the core.
2:13
Alina Dallal
Amazing. I'm so excited to have both of you here. You truly make the best panel for any webinar like this. So. So we're going to kick things off with the first question. Zoe, you've worked in the industry for over 20 years. Now, throughout your career in the companies you've worked at, my first question to you is, what is the hardest challenge you've had with keeping up with your competitors in terms of messaging and positioning?
2:34
Zoe Haimovitch
First of all, there are a lot of competitors, and there's. They publish a lot. There's so much they're doing. Everybody's publishing house, and there's so much content out there, and it's hard to follow everybody what they're doing. Even if you focus only on two. Okay. Or three competitors that you care about the most, there's so much going on all the time. And mostly when you're really in charge of a content program and you have this editorial plan and you're creating all this content and you're working with all your stakeholders and you have all your deadlines, and you end up being very focused on what you're doing and just keeping track of your Trello boards or your. Or your Asana boards, and doing everything to publish your content just keeps you very focused on what you're doing. It's very hard to care about what your competitors are doing at the same time.
3:28
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. So that leads me to my second question for you. From a content perspective, why is it so important to see what your competitors are doing across different channels?
3:40
Zoe Haimovitch
Because when you see what they're doing, you can. You can keep up with what they. What matters to them, who are they talking to, if they're changing their audiences, if they're changing strategies. And you also want to make sure you're different and you're not talking about the same things at the same time. Even if there is an external event that's happening, even if it's a general event that everybody cares about, like Pride Month or any other issue that your company may care about, you don't want to talk about it the same way. You want to keep your differentiation. You want to keep true to your brand values. You want to be differentiate. You want your content to stand out. So if you don't, you have to track what they're doing just so you don't sound the same, look the same, say the same things. You want to keep your own point of view.
4:36
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, at bp, marketers, we work so hard on the content we make, and the last thing we want to see is we've done something worked so hard on, and everyone's doing the same thing, and we want to stand out. So, as you've said that, you know, when the buzzwords, the trends, and the hot topics come up, how do you then ensure that you're not just adding to the noise and doing the same thing.
4:58
Zoe Haimovitch
The way I've done, I've done it over the years is to stay true and always say, I always said the first thing a thought leader needs to do is have a thought. So you can't just say what other people are saying. You have to have your own point of view. You have to have your own perspective of things. So when I look at what my competitors are doing, what they're saying about the same topic, about similar topics of same issues, same challenges, I always make sure that I'm not adding to the noise, but not by not saying the same thing, not having the same point of view. And also I may delay what I have to say and not post it at the same time they are, because I really don't want to add to the noise. I don't want to sound like everybody else. I feel it's all. And I also want to sometimes do things before them and it's okay also to do things after them as long as it's really. That's exactly the right issue, not just adding to the noise. And then nobody will hear me.
6:05
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that, Jen. I'm going to turn to you for the next question. I know you understand this so well, but with everything B2B marketers are juggling, it can be really hard to track competitor content daily. So what are some of the frustrations you've experienced when tracking competitors?
6:22
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely, Alina. I think this hits home for a lot of us on this webinar. So feel free to drop an emoji in the webinar chat if you feel the pain of trying to keep up with tracking your competitors. It is cumbersome. And I think it's one of the biggest frustrations I've ever experienced as a B2B marketer, simply for it's like the sheer inconsistency in competitor visibility. So what do I mean by that? Right. So if you're tracking your competitors and you're a market marketer, usually you. On some days you're on your game and you're waking up, you're getting to, you know, your computer and you're checking out your competitors and you're seeing what they're up to. But most of those days, you kind of stumble upon a post or a campaign or, you know, a blog post, and you think to yourself, like, wow, that was. That's really smart. Or like, that campaign is really cool. How long has that been live? Like, how long has this Been up? And then you start to have these thoughts in your head of like, oh, my gosh, you know, have I missed a key shift in messaging or position? Did I miss an opportunity, which is my biggest fear? And then you kind of understand that it's not really sustainable to check manually every single day what your competitors are doing, because there's just not enough time in the day to do your actual day job. So I think for me, another pain point or frustration when it comes to tracking competitors is the context. A lot of time, you know, you see competitor content and it's really hard to tell how it fits maybe into their broader content strategy or marketing strategy. You're kind of seeing snippets, and then you can easily go down the rabbit hole and like, you know, kind of like the infinite scroll, but you're on your competitor website and then suddenly you're clicking all around the website, just like educating yourself about the competitor, but maybe not making sense of what you're finding necessarily. And then you look at an hour has passed and you realize you've wasted a lot of time, you know, looking at what your competitors are up to, how frequently, you know, they're updating blog posts, what the graphics look like. And then I think we end up making decisions based on these fragments, which can actually, in my opinion, making a decision on a fragment can be quite, I think, risky for not making a decision on an overall strategy, because if you don't have the whole picture and you're just seeing a fragment of what your competitor is doing and you're not zooming out to see the whole picture, you might miss a lot of the journey or a lot of the context of that content marketing material. And that's extremely frustrating. And then right at the end of the day, we have to make sure we're putting actions to whatever it is we're learning from our competitor content. And if we take the wrong action, right, there's risks to that. And then I think there's like something that I call like what I mentioned earlier, the time sync, but it's not only just like you're spending an hour and you go down the rabbit hole. I think there's also a time sink in terms of. Right. Like, I know, Alina, you and I, we had for a while and I know some of our customers. We've also spoken about this where we have a Google deck and we will just see something cool that our competitor does and we take a screenshot, we drop it in the deck, and this deck ends up being like hundreds of slides of the most random screenshots. Right. And it's awesome because you feel super cool that you found this really interesting intel, but you find that this deck fills up quite quickly. And again, there's not enough time in the day to execute or maybe keep up with what you're finding. But I think even more worrisome, in my opinion, is like, you could take a screenshot today and put it in that deck and then like, by the time your marketing team meets to discuss your competitor strategy and see, you know where to take your own strategy. It's not only now a tracking issue, but it's a time issue. Because maybe now the next time you go look at that website, the blog is not there anymore, or whatever you took a screenshot of doesn't exist and you've missed the ball. And I think when you don't use the right B2B tools to track competitors or to track content right, it does kind of feel like you're running in the dark. And those three things together, I would say, are probably my top biggest frustrations.
10:23
Alina Dallal
I think those three are the top main ones that all of us experience. I've experienced them myself, and I'm sure Zoe has as well. And it's not just once you find it, which is very, very time consuming. It's then identifying the trend and understanding what it means. And that brings me to my next question, Zoe, that I'm turning to you for. What are some of the signals that you look for in that tell you that capacity is shifting strategy? And why should brand marketers pay attention to them?
10:49
Zoe Haimovitch
Well, I kind of notice from even what we do or what I've done over the years, you can see that a competitor can be writing about a topic that is not something they used to write about them before. And they can be writing for about six months before they even launch a new product or buy a company or say that they bought this company or like something's changed. And you can, if you track things periodically, like weekly or daily, you can see that they're posting and they're writing and they're publishing and information about topics that they haven't done so before. So, like, even if you were a competitor of Oktopost and you had been following that, we have been posting about marketing intelligence for a while and writing up the tofu type of content about marketing intelligence. And so brand marketers need to pay attention because it's not a coincidence that a competitor is is writing about a topic or dealing with an issue or doing research about something. That they haven't done so before or talking to a different type of audience if they've been reaching out to SMBs instead of enterprise and that you keep, keep seeing things about SMBs and their content. You're saying, wow, this is interesting. Why is this happening? So definitely if there are early signs of something that's going to change, something's going to happen many months before something does change. And you don't have to be a spy, you can just understand the content, you read the content, you're like oh, something's going to happen. And that's why it's really important that you can pay attention to that.
12:42
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And as we know with B2B marketers, no one's changing their messaging for no reason. Something's coming.
12:47
Zoe Haimovitch
Right.
12:48
Alina Dallal
And it helps you get those early indicators and understand that something's happening before it does and before it's out there completely. And I can't wait any longer to get to the next question. I'm so excited to start talking about Marketing Intelligence. Jen, please can you explain to our audience and our listeners what is Marketing intelligence?
13:07
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. So we are super excited about this new product and everyone here on this webinar, this is, you have premier first viewing of how and what is going to happen inside of this new product. So feel free to ask, ask questions in the chat. But basically what is marketing intelligence? So I always like to position this as imagine yourself, right. If let's say I gave you a call and you were like I said to you, would you like to be a fly on the wall in your competitors marketing meeting? Chances are you're going to say yes because I know I would say yes and that's essentially what we've built. Now however, when we try to turn our customers into flies, it was a little unethical. So we did the best thing and we created a tool called Marketing Intelligence. So essentially what marketing intelligence is, is Alina, if you want to hop over to the next slide. Marketing intelligence is built specifically for B2B businesses and it's designed to surface insights into competitors content marketing strategies across various channels. So we'll walk through what that actually means. But, but our, our core pillars of this product are really centered around right centralized marketing intelligence hub where it brings all of this intel into one place making it quite easy. Again you're not sifting the web or going from website to website or taking your screenshots in different Google Docs. Everything lives and breathes inside one hub and you can get your insights in one place and right from Social media ads, email newsletters, blogs, websites. Right? And it's in one powerful research platform, so already a little bit easier to keep up with your competitors. The next piece of the platform is AI powered. And I know AI is such a trend, right? So if anybody wants to talk AI, you know, outside of this webinar, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I think all of us marketers are also trying to understand what best ways to use AI. What I can say with this product is I think we've cracked the nut on how to use AI when it comes to marketing intelligence, because. Right. One of the things that this tool does that I love is leverage advanced AI to basically take all of these insights inside of the hub and spit back to you the analysis. So what's really great is you're now, right, let's say you're looking at a snapshot of a website and you see that something's different, right? Or you go to a blog and you see the content has changed, or you look inside of the news tab and you see this, one of your competitors being written about. Quite often you can go ahead and click on an analysis and it's going to let you know, hey, it looks like the audience has shifted or the messaging has shifted, and it kind of does the thinking for you. And I think that's brilliant. It saves so much time. And then I think what's also nice is it really helps you stay ahead of market shifts with continuous updates. Right. One of the things I have shared earlier was my biggest pain was timing and the time sync. Right. So by the time you see something and act on it, it's already too late. So having everything in one place and getting this continuous daily updates on what's changing. It's a simple morning task. You log in, you take a look what's changing. You can log in during lunch, you could log in, you know, at the end of the. And it's so easy just to see everything in one place. And then lastly, as Everybody here knows, Oktopost, we are B2B to the core. So this product really is tailored for B2B teams. So what do I mean by that? B2B marketers, we care about reports, we care about insights that are going to help us make decisions about our strategy, both in the short term and the long term. So we have all of that built inside of the platform so that you can go ahead and drive results across not only the marketing and your content strategy, but across all areas of the organizations and, you know, from marketers to Executives and I'm, I'm so excited for this tool. So I hope you are too.
16:50
Alina Dallal
We can feel the passion and the excitement. Tool at Oktopost, but that was an amazing intro. But Jen, I think seeing is believing. We want to be that fly on the wall. We want to see the products. I have created a challenge. We're going to be putting marketing intelligence, Zoe and Jen to the test. I'm going to give Zoe and Jen three scenarios of their competitors and they'll tell us what action they would take as a marketer after learning this new Intel. Right, Zoe, you're up first. Are you ready?
17:18
Zoe Haimovitch
Yes.
17:19
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Okay, so here's challenge one. You work at a technology company that sells marketing automation. You're using marketing intelligence. And while you open the tool daily, this morning something caught your eye. These are three blogs or competitors. Post posted. What do you see and what are you going to do with this information?
17:38
Zoe Haimovitch
Okay, first of all, you can see that this, my company is following three brands and all three brands have posted in the last weeks about lead scoring. Okay. To me I'm like, that's interesting. Everybody's talking about lead scoring. This has been around for a long time. Lead scoring. And everybody's talking about the same issue. Leads aren't broken. 7 tips to improve your lead scoring Lead scoring for account based marketing. Everybody's talking about lead scoring. And if I'm in marketing automation as well, I'm saying what's happening is, does somebody know something? Does somebody know something? I don't know, maybe somebody has found a different way of doing things without lead scoring like using AI or doing something really, really smart. Or is somebody just adding lead scoring? New feature for lead scoring. Why is everybody writing about lead scoring? And if I have a blog pending about lead scoring, I would definitely not post it that week. And I will definitely make sure and see why they're talking about lead scoring. I have a feeling something is happening in the market.
18:54
Alina Dallal
Amazing. So we have a content crisis averted. With that I can see someone raised their hand. Karen, if you'd love, you can pop any message you want for us in the chat. We're going to move on to challenge two. Jen, are you ready?
19:07
Jennifer Gutman
I hope so.
19:09
Alina Dallal
Okay, so you are on the marketing team and you own messaging and positioning. Okay. Inside of marketing Intelligence, you get intel on your competitors email, email campaigns. What are the first three nurtures you're signing up to and why?
19:24
Jennifer Gutman
All right, it's a good question. I will preface this that this may just be my favorite part of the tool. A fun Fact about me, before I had my run in B2B marketing, I actually was working in counterterrorism and homeland security. And so this, to me is right up my alley in the sense that you can actually be a fly on the wall. So with this nurture track, I think what's really interesting is if you think about how we're doing it right now without a tool, I don't know about any of you on the webinar, but at least for me, either, my VP marketing is sending me, you know, a forwarded email that she happened to come across where she likes the way marketing is done, or this is a cool idea we should try. Or maybe I came across something myself and I share it with my team. So why I love this tool so much is because it's just super easy. You can literally just sign up for these nurtures. So with that being said, I think, hands down, registering for webinars of my competitors is definitely my first move. We are on one now. I do not think webinars are dead or will ever die, and I'm always looking for creative ways to execute them. And I think we can all feel that pain. So definitely webinars. I also think webinars reveal so much beyond the content. Right? If you see who's presenting the webinar, the tone in which they're presenting the webinar, the audience to who they're presenting to, you can get a feel. Are they presenting to Gen Z? Are they presenting, you know, to a different type of demographic? So I think even beyond the content, the webinars are really important to be that fly on the wall. I also think how they're positioned and how they're keeping engagement high. This is a huge one for me. Right. You all know you entered into the webinar, we asked where you're from. I think these are all great ways to engage in. As B2B marketers, I know we can share among each other. We are always looking for meaningful ways to engage with our customers, with our prospects and potential buyers. So I love getting inspired by how others do it. And even though there are competitors, when I see something really cool, if you sat next to me in the office, I am, like, cheering because it's. It looks so cool. And I think all of us have very creative minds. So when we see something really creative, we're going to want to take it and then do it better. The next one to sign up for after the webinar, I think for me it would be newsletters. One, because I own a lot of Oktopost newsletters. But I think just as webinars show how engaging things could be, I think for newsletters it's gold to understand the cadence, the tone and how our competitors have built long term relationships using these newsletters. I think, and this is just my opinion, but newsletters today, in 2025, everybody sends them, everybody has a newsletter and everybody has email, hundreds of emails. So how is your newsletter going to be different than all the other newsletters? And again, the content is key, but I think also just seeing the layout, seeing what, what might be working, what you haven't tried the subject lines. I don't know if anybody gets stuck with subject lines, but that's a huge one for me. So I always pay attention there. And I know you asked for three, so the third I would say blog subscriptions or like if they have like, you know, subscribe to our blog. And the reason there is kind of what Zoe explained before. You want to see the themes they're leaning into and how frequently they're updating their blog or how frequently they're sending their database blog updates or what content they're picking, right? Because as B2B marketers, we're creating hundreds, if not thousands, if you will, like pieces of content a month, a year. So it's always interesting to me to see what blog has been hand picked by the marketing team to send to their entire database. What, what information do they find critical or interesting? And again, I'll say it, this is what makes B2B marketing so unique and why I love it so much. But content is really the pulse of any B2B brand. Every B2B brand has a content strategy and we want to be able to, you know, it's a fact. So to me, this gives me a real time view when I get these updates from the blog descriptions of what that marketing team cares about. And I want to know about that because maybe like as always said, right, maybe I care about it too, but I need to find a way to say it in a different way. Or maybe I'm put my nerves to rest because I see what they care about is slightly different than what we care about. And I can sleep easier at night. So definitely webinars, newsletters and blogs. And I would say, because it's all about the content.
24:00
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Completely agree with you. And as you're saying, every B2B company has a content strategy. As a content marketer myself, I would love nothing more than to see the newsletters that they're sending out. So this is also my favorite part of the tool, and she has intercepted that intel. And with that, we are going to move over for challenge three. Zoe, I'm coming back to you for this one. Are you ready?
24:21
Zoe Haimovitch
Yes.
24:22
Alina Dallal
Okay. So, Zoe, you own the relationship with the PR agency. As the head of content, you've been working hard to make sure your brand is in the news. So you like to keep tabs on what's being said and talked about when it comes to news and your competitors. You did your daily competitive competitor check in your intel hub, and you noticed there's been some shifts. What's your next move? These are the shifts that you're.
24:45
Zoe Haimovitch
Let's see.
24:47
Jennifer Gutman
Oh, and this is like the AI analysis, right?
24:50
Zoe Haimovitch
This is the AI analysis of the news trends, which is good because then I don't have to read all the PRs.
24:57
Alina Dallal
Find out yourself.
24:59
Zoe Haimovitch
Yes. No, I mean, I trust AI to summarize things. Media coverage has shifted from promoting and scoring. Ooh, look at that. Media coverage has shifted from promoting and scoring models and highlighting revenue growth and AI. So I'm starting to put two and two together reading this. Okay, if last week I saw that they're arguing, all they're doing is writing posts about blogs about scoring. And now media has shifted from that. That was an interesting way of working over there because they wanted us to think that's what they were doing, talking about scoring and something new with scoring. And guess what, they're introducing something new with AI. So I would definitely be happy that I did not write about lead scoring and that I need to see what they're doing, because if it's in the news, it's in the website. And definitely make sure that my PR team is following this. I don't want to come out with the same type of news. And that's what I would do. I would make sure that we do not come out with the same news at the same time. And this is absolutely fascinating. And it's almost like, look what I already saw from the blogs. Yes. Something sure is coming up.
26:36
Alina Dallal
Yeah, it's amazing.
26:39
Jennifer Gutman
I was gonna say, I know when Zoe and I were getting these, you know, looking at these news trends, analysis. The other thing, like, we put our heads together and what was really interesting, too, was, right, we might not always have control over, like, when PRs go out or. Right. We have to. Maybe they go out like 3pm at a certain time. Right. But I think what's interesting here is how we can use this. This up, like kind of this analysis and understand, even for social media. I know Zoe, were talking about this earlier. So let's say your competitors have released this PR or there's some sort of update and everybody's posting the same thing, you don't want to necessarily miss out, but you also maybe want to do it at a different time so you can play around with. Right. Everybody is talking and trending about this, but maybe you bring it up on social so you can connect your marketing content intelligence with how you do your social strategy. So it's already like kind of seeping out from the content head of content and heading into social strategy. And I think it becomes a really helpful tool to really understand and balance what channels you're going to announce. Either the same news or similar news, or if you're going to wait a week and then make a lot of noise on social or whatever it may be.
27:50
Zoe Haimovitch
And also what I also do, if it's in the pr, but it's not in the newsletter, if it's in the pr, but it's not in the blogs, sometimes it's something that they were forced into telling people because sometimes companies go out with a PR because somebody's onto something and they don't want it to be leaked. So it's always good. And I also noticed that in PR, I can also follow issues that are crises. Okay. PRs are not always only good things. So I want to see PR as content, but I also want to see it as news.
28:28
Alina Dallal
Yeah, it's.
28:28
Zoe Haimovitch
It's most important. It's very important to follow.
28:33
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And with that, both of you have identified the trends that we have seen from our AI analysis. And that is a wrap on our marketing intelligence challenge. Zoe, Jen, it looks like you are on top of your competitors and can shift your strategy in just a snap of your fingers. We've only seen a few components of marketing intelligence today. If you are a customer and you love Oktopost and you want learn more, go ahead and talk to your account manager and they'll make sure to point you in the right direction and show you what you can do with marketing intelligence. If you're new to Oktopost, you can go ahead and scan this barcode and learn more about marketing intelligence to see it in action. We're going to move over to the Q and A now so you can go ahead and drop your questions below. I can see we already had a few coming in. Some are in the chat, some are in the Q and A. The first one we have here from Nicole is what's the difference between marketing intelligence and social listening?
29:25
Jennifer Gutman
Oh, Zoe, do you want to take that or do you want me? It's a great question.
29:29
Zoe Haimovitch
Sure. I actually wrote a blog about it. So it's very different. Special listening is more a quantitative effort where you follow. You may follow your competitors and not just your competitors, but it's mostly you follow your competitors and you listen. And it's a quantity play because it's going to tell you how many mentions of their brand, how many posts, how many influencers, leader influencers that mention the brand, how many times. You may have word clouds that are based on quantity. So it's a very quantity related tool. It's very important. You can figure out share of voice from mentions earned versus owned and things like that. It's a very important tool. Marketing intelligence is a qualitative tool where you can see what people are talking about. You have the analysis of the trend, you can see changes in the website, you can understand changes in Personas. And it's more of a qualitative analysis of things of your competitors and what they're doing and what they're writing about. It's really reading the content and social listening is more of a quantitative play.
30:53
Alina Dallal
Amazing. We also have another question. There's been a few questions in the chat asking this and in the Q and A. Zoe, I know you've replied but I think it'll be good to answer it. We've been asked if the nurture track emails will be a unique email address or your personal name and we just
31:12
Jennifer Gutman
want to sure it will be a unique email address as well as a unique name. It's not you, it's an alias and that way you can stay anonymous.
31:23
Zoe Haimovitch
Amazing.
31:24
Alina Dallal
The next question we have in the Q and A is how can marketing intelligence help across the organization beyond marketing?
31:31
Jennifer Gutman
I think this is a really good question. Obviously there's many different ways that I think content marketing intelligence can help across the organization, but I'm going to name a few. So the first camp that I see it helping is in marketing leadership and with strategy. And what do I mean by that? Competitive content positioning is key when it comes to understanding how your competitors are evolving with their messaging and with the themes that they're investing in and maybe where they're putting their resources to create content types and how frequently your competitors are showing up. And I think that by giving this type of intel it helps marketing leaders really fine tune positioning and also differentiate different differentiating themselves from their competitors, which I know we didn't have a lot of time to talk about today and that we could do a whole nother webinar about that on itself. But I think when it comes to camp campaign planning, right, by seeing what's resonating in the market, marketing leaders that are responsible for content and the positioning can really prioritize the campaign themes and think big, zoom out and see the whole picture and close any messaging gaps or seize any untapped opportunities. So for example, like, what comes to mind is like, let's see, three of your top competitors have shifted, as we saw in the example, to maybe an AI first language in the way that they're messaging certain things. So the questions you should be maybe asking yourself and having discussions about in your marketing meeting is right, should we respond, should we also contribute to this type of messaging or should we double down on our own positioning? Right, so these are like questions going through your head. We spoke a lot and I know Zoe's definitely the expert in terms of content and brand teams and I think this is extremely, you know, helpful because if we see all competitors are publishing state of reports, but none are covering, let's say, I don't know, sustainability and B2B tech, should we own that narrative or should we contribute, you know, to what everybody else is doing and finding that balance? And then of course, I think there is an area where there is an opportunity to, as a marketer, you know, if you do find something interesting or you see an interesting webinar, or you think it would be relevant for your, you know, product marketers or sales enablement kind of the revenue team, I do think it's helpful, you know, to forward perhaps if you do see a shift in messaging or maybe an AI summary of some sort to the revenue facing field, facing teams. Because at the end of the day, nobody wants to be on a sales call or a customer call and be told by a customer, oh, I see your competitor is, you know, introducing AI agents or you know, this new feature, what are you doing in this area? And then you're caught with your pants down, if you will, as a salesperson, there's no worse feeling and you have no rebuttal, you have no objection, have nothing to say. Whereas I think if marketers can be on top of that, we can start really bridging the gap between sales and marketing and closing that positioning gap and helping one another to really fine tune our messaging and staying on top of, of the trends and the conversations that are relevant to the audiences that we're targeting.
34:43
Zoe Haimovitch
Does that help? I also want to, I also want to share that, that social media managers that work closely with content and work closely with the other members of the marketing team, they may be social media managers or sometimes in PR and comms and sometimes under brand. And they definitely will benefit from hearing and understanding what others are not necessarily posting about, but doing, writing and discussing, because they might not be posting about it, but that our social media manager may be interested in the topic itself. So I don't think we should. I think sharing more information about the broader content perspective to a social media manager can also make them a better social media manager.
35:35
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. We have another question in here from Rita, which is a great question. She said, at what point do you feel compelled to shift or revisit your overall marketing strategy as a result of the information you receive from these quantitative and qualitative tools? So. And go for both social listening and marketing intelligence.
35:55
Zoe Haimovitch
I can start. It's interesting because, for example, like today, everybody talks about AI, whether they have AI in the tool and in their tool, and they want to talk about the AI that they have in their tool to show that they're on top of things and they have a really good dev team and their tool is modern. Or people talk about an AI. Do they use AI when they write? Do they read emails that were written by AI? I just saw a note saying, I don't read an email written by AI because if it was written by AI, why should I read it? I'll let AI read it. But all kinds of issues and, and opinions about AI. So. And I had a Q3 plan or a Q2 plan to write about AI. And I asked myself, is that, is anybody going to listen to what I had to say about AI if everybody's writing about AI? So I definitely will shift my plans. If I see that this is the big thing and everybody's writing about it in every way and I can't think of a perspective to write about it, then I will shift Rita. I will shift our content plan, I will shift our, change our editorial, decide that our topics should focus elsewhere. It's just, you just can't sound like everybody else, in my opinion.
37:32
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, I can definitely attest to that. I know last year I was leading a few messaging initiatives for certain product lines and, and there were some, you know, we saw competitors and the market talking about different topics that when we planned in Q1, by the time we got to Q3, we thought we had nailed like each quarter. And the theme by Q3 wasn't the theme that the market was talking about anymore. So the mantra that if you were to come to my desk at Oktopost that you see on A post it note above my laptop. I always say marketing intelligence isn't just about spying on your competitors or being that fly. But I think if you think about it as it's about strategically decoding the market's voice and if you think about it from that point of view, you're going to know when you need to change your strategy. And I think it's at that point when you understand that the market voice has shifted that you'll understand that you will be compelled naturally, as a B2B marketer to shift your strategy along with it. Because you know, right. That you need to engage with your audience. And if you've, if the conversation is no longer what you thought would be relevant. Right. We need to move fast. So that's where it helps me also.
38:54
Zoe Haimovitch
I mean, we're connected to what's happening in the company and if there's been churn and, and to a specific segment or industry of your customers and you're saying, okay, I'm going to read, I'm going to, I'm going to check, maybe there's a specific competitor targeting them and I can look at the ads, at the ads and everything, I will, I might shift my strategy and say, okay, I'm going to address this issue, not talk about necessarily churn, but address why my product is better, why my solution is better and choose to show customer case studies, etc. So it definitely impacts the way I want to write and the way what I want to publish, especially in the next quarter.
39:47
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. The insight that you can see from what your competitors doing will really help you shift your trends and make sure that you're in line with what the market and what the audience is interested in. We are ox post after all. So there's one more question I want to ask before we wrap up the Q and a. Q and A. And if we haven't got your questions on, on this webinar, someone will reach out and respond to you. As I said, we're Oktopost. After all, we are social media to the core. How my question for you, especially Zoe, because I know me and you sit on these strategy sessions a lot doing content and social together. How can we take the insights as well from marketing intelligence and feed it into our social strategy? And how can we make both of them help each other to the best of the ability?
40:28
Zoe Haimovitch
Well, I think it goes hand in hand. I don't see any B2B marketer not including social in their campaigns. And I just, to me, social is not about posting, it's about content what kind of content you're going to be putting on social. And so definitely we can see on Marketing Intelligence tool what is happening in their blogs and what is happening in their newsletters and what is happening in their advertising and and what they're talking about. And I would definitely make sure that our, our content plan includes a social media content plan. Okay, so a social media content plan is a subset of the overall editorial content plan and it always is related to our overall content plan. It has its unique emphasis and it has its unique types of content and it can have a unique tone, but it's definitely related in terms of topics, in terms of timing and definitely work together. I don't see anything I do not translated as well into a social media content plan together. I think. And even what we did for Marketing Intelligence, it had to be, it had to go hand in hand.
41:57
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. Me and Zoe sit there all the time, both tools open, hand in hand, working together, feeding the strategies. Thank you, both of you, Zoe and Jen, for joining me. It's been amazing hosting you guys on this panel. Thank you to everybody who joined us. We will be sending the recording out so you will have it. And if we didn't get to any of your questions today in this Q A, we will be reaching out to you. So thank you everybody for joining. And Zoe, Jen, thank you again.
42:21
Zoe Haimovitch
Absolutely. Thank you.
42:22
Jennifer Gutman
It was nice to meet everyone. Bye.
42:24
Zoe Haimovitch
Bye.
