Airmeet

Senior Director of ELG (Event-Led Growth) & Evangelism

The Anonymous Marketer Podcast

This is The Anonymous Marketer. A podcast where we tackle the 
biggest questions from the B2B marketing community. 

But instead of bringing on guests for a quick chat, every question 
comes from an anonymous source. 

These are the questions B2B marketers have but are afraid to 
ask.

Let’s start the conversation.

Host

Navattic

Marketing Advisor

Underscore VC

Underscore Core Community member serving as a valued advisor to Underscore portfolio companies.

Core Partner

Peak Community

An invite-only community specifically designed for the best marketers and marketing leaders to connect and get 1% better each week.

Member

RevGenius

RevGenius is a group of revenue generating sales and marketing professionals brought together to learn, share, support, and grow with each other. You can consider us your alt work family!

Founding Member

Alyce

Director of Evangelism & Customer Marketing

Director of Field, Community, and Partner Marketing

Director of ABM

Goldcast

Strategic Advisor

Audience & Income

A private community of LinkedIn creators working together to grow our audience and create income online.

Pavilion

The Revenue Collective is a private, invitation-only organization exclusively for top sales, marketing, and operations leaders and executives worldwide.

Associate

Sr. Director of ELG & Evangelism @ Airmeet | The Anonymous Marketer Podcast Host | Advisor | B2B SaaS Marketing | Passionate about the creator economy in B2B

Check out my Linktree with all my resources: https://linktr.ee/NickBennettMarketing

50k+ followers on LinkedIn in 3 years with over 28+ million views on my content in 3 years.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ME:

◆ I'm a digital native: tech and social media come as easily to me as face-to-face meetings. I'm a motivator by nature, making sure my team reaches their maximum potential. 
◆ Sports are my biggest passion outside of the office. I co-founded an adult amateur baseball league, and I still play myself. How can you not love America's greatest pastime?
◆ I have a focused vision of my future. Does it involve climbing Mount Everest? No, but I do aim that high. I want to disrupt the marketing industry just like Seth Godin. I'm eager to branch out and establish myself as a future thought leader.

Here’s an easy-to-spot red flag for whatever organization you’re with:

If a new marketing leader comes in and says they’ve been using the same playbook for years, the chances just increased that you’re going to hit diminishing returns really, really quick.

Strategies and best practices stick around. 

Tactics and playbooks don’t.


Nick Bennett

Marketers are often trying to be everywhere at once.

We’ve got to stop that.

In the immortal words of Ron Swanson, “Never half ass two things, whole ass one thing.” The same goes for your mix of channels.

Here’s a for instance: Everyone knows you can’t build a brand on social media by passively posting every once in a while. 

You’ve got to identify which networks you must be on, develop a strategy, dedicate resources to them, and consistently post.

The same rules apply no matter which kind of X-Led Growth you’re doing.

In the case of Event-led growth, this means a few things:

• Establish why you’re doing the event
• Mixing up your event types 
• Engage with your audience pre-, during, and post-event
• Enabling your sales teams to understand the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) of each event.
• Having a clear follow-up strategy

Hosting an event that drives awareness, qualifies leads, or engages customers isn’t an afterthought. 

It’s all about focus.


I believe in cause and effect but sometimes…

Sometimes things come together in a way that’s just too perfect.

Sometimes it feels like the universe tells you exactly where you should go next.

Sometimes you just have to listen and then act.

👀

Spending time with the babies while they try to eat each other. 

Have a fantastic weekend! 

✌️

This lovely little lady turned 5 this week. 

I can’t believe it. We always joked that we couldn’t wait till she was 5 because we felt like it was some huge thing and maybe she’d sleep longer. 

She still gets up at 545/6 am every day, which is tricky when you have twins now. 😂

But we still love her!

Smoothies and sun ☀️ 

Happy Mother’s Day to all those moms out there! Enjoy your day.

As marketers, we have to come to grips with one thing in particular:

Nothing will ever be perfect.

Sales handoffs won’t be 100% perfect. Every event won’t have record-breaking attendees. Your ebook won’t get 14,423,957 downloads.

And that’s okay.

Instead of chasing perfection, chase better. Improving small things over the long run can have huge returns over time.

#marketing


As a marketer, I have submitted many demo requests in my career, and I was always blown away by how long it took for someone to get back to me. 

Then what would happen is you would wait a few days to hear back, have to jump on a qualification call and waste another 30-45 minutes and then jump on another call to see the product finally. 

That is not good, and it's why I now go direct to connections at companies to get a demo vs. submitting it on a website. 

My good friends at Navattic & Chili Piper surveyed 100 of the fastest-growing SaaS companies to understand the inbound buying process.

And based on the 35% no response rate, it looks like there is a lot of work to be done.

Imagine all the budget and campaigns marketing put together to get a potential buyer to raise their hand and ask to speak with the sales team…

Only to never even hear from them.

In a market where companies are aiming to be efficient with their growth

Companies are still not rolling out the red carpet for high-intent buyers.

Check out the full article from Navattic and Chili Piper for more insights like:

• How many leads are routed to SDRs vs AEs
• On average, how many email followups we received per company
• how many companies show their product before you have to speak with sales

This is so good, and I learned a ton. It's ungated, BTW.

https://lnkd.in/eTpkSzUk

It’s easy enough to come on LinkedIn and drop stats like “I just passed six figures in side hustle revenue streams,” but what’s not as easy is pulling back the curtain. 

So let’s do just that. 

To start things off, my primary revenue stream comes from Airmeet. A huge part of what made it an easy ‘yes’ to accept this role is that they support me in my 9-5 and my 5-9.

As for additional revenue streams 👇

In 4 months of 2023, I just crossed $50,000 in side hustle income. But what’s my actual why?

Well, for me, I want to provide for the fam. With three daughters now, I want to be able to set up savings accounts for them and invest and secure their future growth as well. 

Let’s talk about what these streams of revenue actually look like.

• Podcast Sponsorships (Got room for a few more if anyone is interested)
• Advising 
• Referral % on closed-won sourced & influenced deals for a few companies
• Brand Deals 
• Ghostwriting 

Now, let’s talk about the how. Listen, I didn’t start monetizing my brand until I was about two years into this journey (now just passing three years of posting every day). 

I always wanted to give everything away, no questions asked. Jump on and help as many people as possible. I had no plans to monetize anything until a few brands started coming to me. 

That snowballed into advising opps where I was paid a retainer vs. equity and referral kickbacks on closed-won deals. 

In 2022, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I made about $18,000 for 2022 and didn’t start taking it seriously until last summer. So I decided that I would work hard and would put out there that I was open to doing some things in my free time. Every single opportunity that has come to me has come inbound due to showing up on here every day for 3+ years. 

The story's point is that it’s all about trying and failing, seeing what works for you, and realizing that this isn’t an overnight success. This is dedication and hard work of 3+ years of effort. 

Don’t expect it all right from the jump. Put in the work.

Bryan and I launched the Creators Circle a month ago.

We have 86 people who are joining us so far on this journey. We've gotten tremendous feedback from the first two, and open rates are through the roof. 

Now that the first two issues are out, do you prefer weekly or biweekly newsletters?

In case you missed the topics so far, here they are.

1. Understanding the algorithm, how often to post on social - Posted
2. What does authenticity mean and why is it important to brands and creators? - Posted
3. How creators and companies can work together - Models of creator/company collaboration
4. Ideation to creation - what’s it take to get a piece live
5. Okay, fine, we’ll talk about AI - a measured response
6. Breaking into unresponsive markets
7. You got your flywheels in my funnel: how to leverage creator content at every step of the customer journey

We are tempted to turn this into a weekly thing if there is an appetite, but we don't want to dilute things, either. 

#newsletter #creatoreconomy #creators 

We did it y’all! 

The Anonymous Marketer Podcast won an award for top marketing podcast of 2023 by Signals. 

Such great company to be in too. 

Real Marketers - Stephanie Cox 
Exit Five - Dave Gerhardt 
The Marketing Millenials - Daniel Murray 
Account Based Beverages - Jim Gilkey 

This project has been a blast to work on, and appreciate everyone who listens and supports the show. 

The best has yet to come!

I’ve got some sad news. My creator page on Mavens will be shutting down on 5/31. 

Consider my tagline…

Haters Hate Creators Create a rare collector's piece. 😂

I appreciate all of you who bought something and all the pictures and laughs. It means the world to me. 

I make $0 off any of this. I just wanted people to know that the moment you hit post, there will always be haters. Never let them stop you from creating. 

Head on over to my page if you want any last-minute items! 

https://lnkd.in/ebXyuR27

What a ride! It’s been a blast, and again, thank you for all the support.

Something BIG is coming on June 1st. 

Our biggest event of the year. 

Launching something that has never been done before that'll change the game. 

Spent the day in Boston with Mark Kilens and Colleen Koslosky to finalize the last few pieces. 

You don't want to miss this. As a marketer, I have wanted this for YEARS. We've got some special surprises up our sleeves, too, and a ton of incredible speakers. 

Join me and the other 400+ marketers registered so far: https://lnkd.in/e2Z4rDKX

One revenue team. That’s the dream, right? 

Shoutout to Craig Simons 🎤 of EnableMinutes and Allego for having me on to share my thoughts around this. 

So, often we have misaligned teams. It’s usually due to one big reason. 

Lack of communication. 

Everyone is doing their own thing but aren’t talking to each other. 

If you can open those lines of communication as a marketer, it’ll fuel the entire growth and retention strategy. 

End silos!

We just announced our partnership with PartnerHacker!

I couldn’t be more excited, this is a classic – customer to partner story. 

PartnerHacker used Airmeet to create one-of-a-kind experiences for their audience of partner folks. 

As they developed their POV around Nearbound and we developed our Event-Led Growth, the alignment was too clear to ignore!

Nearbound is the overarching GTM strategy.
Event-Led is a specific approach within that strategy. 

We’re not going to change anything about working together. 

Still no affiliate links.

Still no pitches.

This partnership will bring more PartnerHacker X Airmeet content and events.

I’m super excited to dig into this partnership because I believe ecosystems and partnerships are the future.

#partnerships #ecosystem #nearbound #eventledgrowth


Email, Social, Paid Ads…

…yeah, if a marketing channel died every time someone said so, we’d use a chisel and stone to communicate with our prospects and customers. 

Events are the latest on the chopping block. 

Everyone said that COVID was the end of in-person events, but I can tell you that people feel the same as before. Everyone said that tons of people were dealing with webinar fatigue, but, as I wrote recently, statistics show otherwise.

The truth is that the channels aren’t dead — the way of using them is.

Every marketing channel has evolved over time. So, LinkedIn isn’t the same place it was 10 years ago. The same goes for email, webinars, and every other you can think of.

If you want to get the most out of the channels your audience uses, you’ve got to be creative. 

You can’t run the same playbook for a decade and expect the same results.


There are three principles to success in marketing these days: 

• People 
• People
• People

Borrowing this idea from Richard Branson, who said that about business almost a decade ago. 

Marketing has become super impersonal between third-party databases, intent data, and every other shiny new piece of tech out there. It shows. 

Think back to how many “personalized” emails you’ve gotten where your old company name was filled in.

If your marketing efforts aren’t resonating with your audiences anymore, try focusing less on the nameless, faceless audience and more on the people you’re looking to help.

That might mean a lot of things that may not necessarily scale or scale quickly:

• Connecting and sharing with your audience on social
• Sending more 1:1 emails from team members
• Talk with people at events (digital or otherwise)

Whatever you do, put people first.


How do you use webinars and events to up-level your entire revenue engine?

We'll show you ways to make your events more interactive and personalized so you can book more meetings and create more pipeline.

Did you know that our events in Q2 will drive a few million dollars in pipeline, with about 75% coming from ICP? We may know a thing or two to help you be successful. 

Ultimately, ELG comes down to three things:

1. Experience
2. Engagement  
3. Data

You'll get tangible takeaways to make your events and webinars memorable that drive pipeline and revenue using these three things.

I'll discuss it with Mark Kilens at the Efficient Growth Tour on May 30th at 1 pm EST. 

Shoutout to AudiencePlus, Clearbit, and Mutiny for throwing a killer event. Have you seen the speakers yet?! I am going to be learning so much. 

Join us! https://lnkd.in/ewR44Mw2

Get ready for an epic journey!

Bryan and I just inked the deal for our upcoming book about B2B Influencer Marketing & The Creator Economy. 

Witness the entire creation process unfold in public view.

Follow us for behind-the-scenes insights and sneak peeks!

Ready to join our adventure? Follow along! 

PS: Want to know the real reason I want to write a book? It's not the money. I plan on using this to get me into speaking engagements and other opportunities down the line. 

Have a fantastic weekend, everyone! 

✌️

Have you ever wanted to roll out of bed and be on the beach in Costa Rica? 

This picture is ONE of the three AirBNBs that we have for hiatus. 

All of them are right on the beach. 

November 1st - 4th, we'll be in Playa Hermosa, Costa Rica.

Some of the best B2B Creators getting together to create content, collaborate, learn, and take our ideas and creativity to a whole new level. 

I have had this idea to get some B2B creators together for a few days for a while, and it failed when I tried to launch it last year, but we are locked and loaded for this one and finally bringing it to life. 

Join:
me
Kyle Lacy 
Corrina Owens 
Todd Clouser 🧙‍♂️💜 
kelsey calabro 
Ky Shaw 

And others (we are capping this event at 20 people, though) to experience something that will be one of the best experiences you'll ever have. 

PS: The best part? It's all-inclusive. You can get a private room or shared room, and then everything is included in that price. So all you gotta do is buy your plane ticket. 

7 spots left- Want the link to buy a ticket? Comment below, and I got you. 

Customer marketing is often forced into just marketing to customers.

It’s also about collaborating with your customers to elevate the rest of your marketing.

For anyone who’s struggling to reach their ideal customers, I’d recommend creating (or improving upon) a customer marketing program. I’ve done it multiple times in my career and can attest to the results.

If you want to get started, check out this piece I wrote for Capterra: Customer Marketing—The Channel You Can't Ignore.

https://lnkd.in/eSZqvt7t

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask additional questions in the comments.


Content simply isn’t enough anymore.

It’s just table stakes now.

Every marketing team worth its weight in chips has a content marketing engine putting out great content week after week, quarter after quarter, year after year.

That makes for a lot of content for your audiences to read if you’re in a competitive space.

That’s why we’ve gone all in on Event-led Growth at Airmeet.

Unlike most content programs, events can:

• Offer a singular experience that’ll only happen once
• Engage and interact with your audience in real time
• Capture your audiences’ attention for longer
• Make for a personalized, individualized experience
• Tailor your event in real-time based on audience feedback

This isn’t a content <<<<<< events post. Content will always have a place.

Today’s audiences are looking for something a bit more as they’re engaging with brands to learn from them. 

Events are actually just like the written content of ten years ago. It’s a clear path toward growth (when done right).


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