Udi Ledergor is the Chief Marketing Officer at Gong, the leading Revenue Intelligence Platform. As a 5-time VP of Marketing, Udi brings 20 years of experience heading marketing teams. Udi has helped several B2B companies grow faster by optimizing and transforming their marketing efforts. He is also the author of The 50 Secrets of Trade Show Success.

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview between Ian Faison and Udi Ledergor, CMO of Gong. A 5-time VP of Marketing, Udi has 20 years of experience heading marketing teams and is an expert in helping B2B companies grow faster by optimizing and transforming their marketing efforts.

On this episode, Udi discusses the synergy between Gong’s demand gen efforts and brand plays, and lays out the content strategy that he uses to drive inbound and outbound motions that have created thousands of MQLs every month for a $2.2B B2B powerhouse.

Key Takeaways

Ways the content marketing landscape is changing in our fast-paced, digital-first world
How to build compelling content that reaches your audience on the channels they frequent most
The three basic elements every successful content machine must include

Quotes

The biggest mistake that brands make is they start with what they want to say rather than what their prospects or customers want to hear. By starting from the customer side and working back, you can give them what they want in a way that also serves your brand.

99% of our content takes less than five minutes to consume. We’ve found that with today's attention span, especially of busy executives, that type of content is hugely popular. If you're going to create a 40-page ebook like we did 10 years ago in content marketing, the only ones likely to read it are your competitors.

Here's the really simplified truth: we create darn good content, and we use that content to drive both our inbound and outbound motions. Then we create thousands of MQLs every month by looking at who's consuming our content and attending our events.

LinkedIn is my cheapest demand gen channel. We can get thousands of downloads in a day and that doesn't cost me a dime. It’s completely organic. That's why I love this channel. I know that the people are there because they want to be, I'm not chasing them. I could not live without that channel.

The days where we could plan six months ahead for a content project are long gone. Either your content is stale or it's just completely detached from what's going on in the market.

Become best friends with your CRO or VP of Sales. You have to put your ego aside and understand that you are there to make sales easier. You can't build the right demand gen machine if you don't understand exactly what your sales team needs. If you manage to make sales’ lives easier, you will have built a successful demand gen machine. It’s that simple.

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Episode Transcript

(4:00) Udi’s Demand Gen Strategy

Create “darn good” content based on insights they gleaned from millions of sales conversations
Develop data-backed content to show sales teams what’s working and what isn’t working
This content drives both inbound and outbound motions
For outbound, they look at the prospects who are heavy consumers of their content and match their ICP, and then a sales rep starts a conversation. This drives about 60% of their pipeline.
For inbound, the same content drives qualified buyers to their website, where they use conversational optimization to convert relevant visitors. This drives about 40% of their pipeline.

(6:12) Gong’s Marketing Team Structure

Divided into two teams: Demand Gen and Product Marketing
Demand gen: Content creation, marketing operations, events, ABM, digital marketing
Product marketing: Product marketing, customer marketing

(16:56) Udi’s Uncuttable Demand Gen Budget Items

LinkedIn page: Discovered their audience is active on LinkedIn, so they focus on creating content and engagement within that channel. This is Gong’s cheapest demand gen channel, as it’s all organic engagement
Email list: Gong has built a large opt-in email list of people interested in receiving their content. They send tailored content to various reader personas to ensure they continue to engage them in a relevant way.
Virtual events and webinars:

(22:17) Building a Successful Content Engine

Three basic elements of a content engine: strategy, packaging, and distribution
Excellent content must be relevant, interesting, and immediately applicable
Content relevance must be immediately apparent to the reader. For example, call out the buyer person in the title of the content.
Content should have some urgency about it to make it especially interesting. For example, a couple months ago when our new economy started to take shape, Gong noticed more CFOs were getting involved in purchase decisions. They figured other companies were experiencing a similar buying trend, so they created a template for how to get through your buyer’s CFO, and in days it became their most downloaded content asset ever.

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