The Feed, The Feed, The Feed

Just as Gen. Douglas MacArthur proclaimed in his farewell speech – “The Corps, The Corps, The Corps,” referring to the famous Marine Corps Battle Hymn – or actually nothing like it, B2B marketing has gradually and then suddenly become almost entirely about The Feed. 

The Before Times

When I got my start, Salesforce’s “Behind the Cloud” was the bible for how to break through the noise and market even the most utterly boring category (enterprise software in the cloud) in an exciting way. They were making big splashes in person, at events, which would sometimes get press coverage and ultimately raise their profile (and their crusade, importantly). You would see Salesforce.com on the news, or trade press; you might even see their famous anti-Oracle ad they ran in newspapers and magazines. The big thing is there were gatekeepers to your company getting noticed (press, event organizers) and financial hurdles (print media and TV were expensive).

Today: Everybody’s Poasting

With Meta, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn, there’s been a near-complete flattening of B2B media. Trade press no longer necessarily garners any wider reach than any moderately influential person. Personally I think this is a bad thing; gatekeepers are good in certain amounts but it’s clear the pendulum has swung. And many (most?) of us are almost exclusively getting our news (or, being “influenced”) from the various feeds we doomscroll all day. So that’s it: the new –perhaps singular– task of B2B marketing is to just simply win the feed. Chances are your audience is there, they’re identifiable by name, job title, and company, and you can literally post your way into their life feed. You can buy your way into it in many various ways too, which is why ABM analytics company Octane11 is seeing a marked increase in Paid Social (at the expense of Open Web, perhaps). 

What it Means for You: Take the Influencer Pill?

Firstly, everything might have just gotten easier. You have direct in-feed access to a highly segmentable and targetable audience at massive scale – and they’re hopelessly addicted to their feeds. They’re watching that thing in M*A*S*H series finale numbers, all day, 7 days a week. You no longer necessarily have to do the PR / press dance, or like actually have real news to get attention. You just have to do at least one of these two things well:

1. Take the influencer pill – comment on literally everything and start threads optimized for engagement (take controversial / bold stances on recent industry news, poke the bear, be a dick, all these things tend to work if you commit to doing it relentlessly).

2. Regularly put out authentic and interesting stuff that speaks to your customers’ motivations - the good news is, with so many influencers flooding the zone with shit, authenticity and actually useful content does stand out. All you have to do is get your customer to stop scrolling for a second to check out what you have to say. That influencers do this through sheer volume doesn’t make a thoughtful approach any less effective. Doesn’t sound so exciting though, does it?

Some people are just naturally gifted at #1 and if that’s you, go for it. When the founder or CEO has natural influencer abilities, they market their companies effectively and relentlessly. It’s self-reinforcing: consistently driving engagement in the feed means the algo shows you more often. But it’s truly hard to manufacture this ability and commitment out of someone who doesn’t see themselves like that. In my newsletter I try to always dig into the non-unicorn side of things – what can anyone do vs. what did the 0.1% most successful people do that you probably can’t?

Quality Has a Quantity of its Own

“You’ve been tagged in this photo” has got to be the best subject line anyone’s ever come up with. “Your credit score changed today.” Just mainlined into your personal motivations. There’s a lot of nihilism about the attention economy as if it’s just this big formula that decides what’s interesting. Elon Musk turns a dial and suddenly we’re all making corny DOGE jokes. We all need AI Agents that are going to negotiate deals on the blockchain with each other (?!). I think all this is bullshit. I think the more flood-the-zone influencing and AI slop that gets dumped into our feeds, the more things like actually understanding the emotional and cognitive motivations of your customers will break through. “Just be loud” as advice has massive survivorship bias – you probably aren’t going to be the loudest. You don’t even need to be the best. You just need to have a story that’s relevant to your customer and be consistent with it because they’re going to ignore it the first three times they see it. Brands that are built steadily over time become more durable that way. Do you serve a niche audience that nobody has built a podcast for? Do it – and make it about them, not about your company. Now you have a consistent weekly post to make on LinkedIn that is laser-focused on their needs. The more niche the better, the more segmented the more effective you can be in striking a nerve.

That’s it.